How Maggie O'Farrell's inner 'neek' came out with Land
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Who is Maggie O'Farrell and what is her new book Land about?
ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Hi there book people, Jonathan Green here to let you know about a decidedly bookish episode of RN's food and culture show Every Bite. You might want to check ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts for our episode titled A Memory of Madeleine's. Yes, we take a leaf from Marcel Proust and wonder about food and memory, or more particularly about Madeleines and memory and Marcel Proust. Fun fact, the early drafts of In Search of Lost Time contained no Madeleines. I'll tell you the story of that on every bite. MUSIC
Hello from Whadjuk Noongar land, I'm Clare Nicholls, and this is The Book Show, where I bring you conversations with your favourite fiction writers. Later, Robert Forster is going to join me. You might know him as the singer-songwriter from the iconic Australian band The Go-Betweens. He's written a novel about musos on the run. But first up, it's Maggie O'Farrell and Lande. Maggie O'Farrell is here. She is best known for her novels Hamnet, The Marriage Portrait and her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am. Her new book, well, the hint is in the title. It is called Land and it's about an Irish mapmaker and his son and what it means to record and live on the land. Maggie O'Farrell, it's great to have you back on the book show.
Thank you very much for having me. It's lovely to be here.
And you had a family member who drew some of the early maps of Ireland. Maggie, tell me about this man.
So we always had a myth in our family. We were told as children that one of our forebears had drawn or worked on the early maps of Ireland. And when I was a child, I think I imagined him as a kind of one-man band. I would look out the window of our car at Dingle or Dunedin Connemara or Donagall, wherever he happened to be, and I'd think, how would one person go about doing that? But obviously, when I was a bit older, I realised that he was very far from alone. And when I went to search for him in the archives in Dublin, I realised that, of course, the mapping of Ireland, the Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland, was an enormous project that employed all kinds of people. So it originally started in the 1820s, but my great-great-grandfather worked on the second revisions of the map of Ireland in the late 1840s, 1850s.
Were you able to find evidence of your great-great-grandfather when you went and did that research?
Yes, he was hard to find because if you were Irish and you were employed by the British Ordnance Survey, you were not allowed to sign your own work. It had to be signed by a British army officer. So I could see his name. in lists of labourers, as they were called, on memorandum and payslips and things like that. But the actual field books and notebooks and draft maps, it was really hard to tell what was his. And there were some that I would have thought it was maybe his handwriting, but I wasn't entirely sure because if you're Irish, you weren't allowed to sign his own work. So he was definitely there, but it was hard to identify exactly which field notebooks were his.
Yeah.
What inspired this research? Was it because you knew you might want to write a novel about this man?
I've always been really interested in him and his son, my great-grandfather, who, as in the novel, the son has a really interesting trajectory. He goes off and becomes a Jesuit, which anyone who knows anything about the Catholic Church, being a Jesuit is not something you just happen to fall into one day. It's something that you completely dedicate years of your life to train for. So he became a Jesuit and then he He left, which in Ireland was an enormous deal. To leave the church in Ireland, you're risking being a social outcast, really. So he left and he came full circle and became a mapper, just like his father. So that relationship between the two of them has always really fascinated me. And also, when I went to the archives in Dublin, I realised that my great great grandfather had been working on the Ordnance Survey revision of Ireland, just in the later years of the Great Famine.
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