A Family’s Survival

The brutality of colonialism haunts Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel, Land. The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Hamnet brings her extraordinary skill for rendering family grief to a sprawling story that crosses several landscapes and spans millennia. Land manages to be both a book of ambitious scope and a humble, quiet story of one Irish family fighting for survival against both British rule and personal demons on a haunted, dog-shaped peninsula in the aftermath of the Great Hunger.

Tomás, a child when the famine sweeps Ireland, survives what the rest of his family does not, only to be sent to a punishing workhouse. The bright spot in his difficult boyhood is fellow workhouse orphan Phina, whom he grows up to marry. As adults, their family life is pleasant, if financially difficult. They make ends meet for a time on Tomás’ talents as a cartographer, a job that finds him reporting to the same “redcoats” who laid waste to his land and his people. One day, on the job with his son Liam, the silent, stoic Tomás stumbles upon a spring that is haunted by a young girl and her dog who were slain and buried there exactly a millennium earlier, when a sickness as devastating as the Great Hunger of Tomas’ childhood incited the elders to sacrifice a maiden to stop the outbreak. Unaware of the dead girl and the way in which she haunts the spring, Tomas nonetheless emerges garrulous, ranting about no longer making maps with redcoat-approved place-names. Instead, he’ll make true maps that reflect the violence wrought by his homeland’s colonizers.

A priest performs an “exorcism” on Tomas, which is, in actuality, an act of horrific torture. Despite this violence, Tomas persists, for a while, in no longer accepting pay from the British, which puts his family in a precarious position. Making matters worse, he moves them from a decent town to a decrepit cottage on the isolated land near the haunted spring. Phina is furious when she sees their new home, and Tomas’ two eldest children grow angry and bored there. Young Enda misses her classroom and her prospects of becoming a teacher, while Liam turns his back on Tomás and finds that his only solace in the lonely new place is studying for a holy life with the priest who tortured his father. The youngest daughter, Rose, clings to her mother and becomes her baby brother’s caretaker when he is born with developmental issues that result in a lifelong inability to speak. 

This is a story of a family torn apart by poverty, ancient curses, and each member’s desperate need to find a way out. As bleak as the divergent paths of Tomás and his family become, their way, and the way of the people who suffered on the land prior to their time, is lit by O’Farrell’s stunning sentences and breathtaking prose. Take for instance, this sentence from the point of view of the peninsula’s ancient inhabitants:

Holy men with shaven pates have come over land from the east and built themselves a large stone dwelling place down by the marsh, where they keep bees and gather the moist green marsh plants and sing together, and sometimes the sound of their song floats out over the roofs of the huts, and the man, and his woman, and their people listen and wonder.

The book is composed of thousands of such sentences, packed with striking images, clear sounds, and a palpable sense of movement.

If the prose here is divine, the way O’Farrell handles time feels like a series of little miracles enacted over and over. Decades sometimes elapse in the space of one sentence. O’Farrell can render a century in the space of a paragraph. Eliding time here does not result in loss, but in a propulsive, expansive narrative: “Some time later, perhaps a few years, perhaps hundreds — it’s hard to pinpoint in the colossal lifespan of a landscape — a woman from down by the shore climbs up the slope between the two hillocks at the base of the mountain.” 

O’Farrell further masters time by dividing the novel into four parts, each moving backward and forward in time in a way that repeatedly adds meaning to the story even as several side-quests — which in the hands of a lesser author could create confusion — spring from the central story and move beautifully toward convergence.