'Hamnet' novelist Maggie O'Farrell maps her Irish roots in 'Land'
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's June and another big week in the run-up to the midterms. Primaries in half a dozen states, including California, where new congressional maps are in place and a chaotic race for governor is wide open. We're also following gas prices and Iran. So far, talk of a peace deal is just talk. We'll keep you posted. Listen every morning, up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Our guest is author Maggie O'Farrell. She's best known for her 2020 novel, Hamnet. It was adapted into a movie last year, and Jesse Buckley won an Oscar for her performance as Agnes Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's wife. O'Farrell co-wrote the film's screenplay with its director, Chloe Zhao.
Maggie O'Farrell spoke to Fresh Air's executive producer, Sam Brigger, about her new novel, Land. Here's Sam.
Hamnet is a fictionalized version of the story of William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes Hathaway. It's about how they meet and fall in love, marry and have children. Their young son, Hamnet, dies from the plague. The grief shakes the family and leads Shakespeare to write his play, Hamlet. O'Farrell's novel, Hamnet, won Britain's Women's Prize for Fiction. Maggie O'Farrell has a new novel called Land. It takes place in Ireland in the 1860s, beginning with Tomás and Liam, an Irish father and 10-year-old son, out in foul weather, mapping a peninsula as part of the British Ordnance Survey of Ireland. Tomás, somewhere between employed and indentured to British soldiers, is tasked with modernizing the maps of Ireland.
Something magical happens on the peninsula that forever changes the trajectory of their family and compels Tomas to move his family from the tight quarters of their city's one-room apartment to an abandoned cottage on the peninsula and begin an agrarian life. There are many abandoned cottages and houses and villages throughout Ireland, as the novel takes place only a decade or so after the country's great famine. The countryside has been emptied out, with millions lost to the famine and to emigration. Tomás is in part mapping the erasure of those lives from the land. O'Farrell has written eight other novels, children's books, and a memoir called I Am, I Am, I Am, 17 Brushes with Death, about, well, her brushes with death, nearly being murdered, nearly drowning, and her childhood encephalitis that left her with various balance and spatial recognition challenges.
What is the significance of Maggie O'Farrell's novel 'Hamnet'?
Maggie O'Farrell, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much for having me. It's lovely to be here.
So can you tell us what the spark was for your new book, Land?
Oh, well, I'd say it crept up on me very slowly. I've always really been interested in the life of my great-great-grandfather, on whom, to us, the character is based. He worked for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland in the mid-19th century, just after the Great Famine had taken place. And... I thought about him for years and I thought about his son for years. His son was my great-grandfather and he took a very different path in life initially from his father's. He became a Jesuit, which, as anyone knows anything about Catholicism, is not a job you just happen to fall into. It's something that you really, really commit yourself to and it takes years to train. He was a Jesuit for a while and then he left, quite astonishingly, hence my existence and the existence of all my cousins and siblings here.
And he came full circle and became a mapper like his father. So the two of them was always really interested in me, but I could never really see a way forward to making into a novel until I was on a train a few years ago on the way from Belfast to Dublin. And just suddenly, and I wish this happened more often, Sam, but the very first line of the book just slid into my head, which is his father was ever a man of few words. And it was really extraordinary.
I've never had this experience before. As soon as I had that first line, I could suddenly see the path of the whole novel. I could see how I could do it.
So, I mean, not to give too much away, but this book does really map the history of your family there.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:32
2
What is the significance of Maggie O'Farrell's novel 'Hamnet'?
2:32–6:06
3
How does 'Land' explore the aftermath of the Great Famine?
6:06–12:39
4
What inspired Maggie O'Farrell to write 'Land'?
12:39–20:43
5
How do maps reflect history and identity in O'Farrell's work?
20:43–27:53
6
What role does the Ordnance Survey play in 'Land'?
27:53–35:28
7
How does O'Farrell portray the impact of the Great Famine?
35:28–48:11
Speakers
5 identifiedMore from Fresh Air
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