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Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: What personal connection does Maggie O'Farrell have to the mapping of Ireland?
algebra it involves art cartography history linguistics folklore you know it's an incredibly complicated you had to be a renaissance man to be working on it in those times I love seeing the way your face lights up when you're talking about maps Maggie and I just think this is so amazing because five years ago you and I were talking about Shakespeare and Hamnet and now you know you've found this whole new area of interest I mean what a life you lead
My kids, my teenagers now, they call me a neek. I don't know if you know that name, Claire. It's a cross-teen nerd and a geek.
Look, you're with fellow neeks here on the book show, so you're in safe hands.
Good. I'm proud of it. I'm going to wear it as a badge of honour.
So your novel is Land. It opens in 1865 on a peninsula stretching into the Atlantic Ocean. We have the father, Thomas, and the son, Liam. They're out there mapping the landscape. And then this dad character, he encounters a spring or a toba. Is that how you pronounce it, a toba? Tuba, yes. What happens when he comes across this well of water?
Well, the first line of the novel is, his father was ever a man of few words. And that describes Tomás, who, as we've made an allusion to, he's been through a very, very, he's had a very, very difficult life. And there are many things that he's seen that he cannot speak about. So one of his solutions, I think, to cope with this is not really to speak very much at all.
And he goes into an ancient piece of woodland, a copse, which doesn't appear on the map. And he thinks he's going to have to survey it and map it and put it on the map. But when he's in there, he realizes that maybe he shouldn't, because this is a part of Ireland that has never been touched by the colonizers.
And he encounters in there a sacred well or a spring or a tubba, as it's called in Irish culture. And something happens to crack him open. I've always been really fascinated by sacred wells or holy wells, as they're called in Ireland. They're everywhere in the Irish landscape.
It's quite unusual to find a town or a village that doesn't have one, at least, either in the village or on the outskirts. And they're really fascinating. They go right back to Ireland's pre-Christian, pagan, druidical belief system.
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Chapter 3: How did the Great Famine influence the mapping of Ireland?
You know, the weird thing, the weirdest, I suppose the only way to explain the weirdness of it is, you know, you're sitting in this room and you look around and literally everybody you see is somebody you've seen on screen, on TV or cinema in the last 10 years or even longer in some cases. There's one point where I was queuing to get out of a,
the aisle and I heard some people behind me having a conversation and I thought that's really strange that man sounds exactly like George Clooney and then I thought oh that's because it is George Clooney and that's just it just you know your brain is sort of lagging behind the reality of what's going on but it's I mean seeing all the frocks up close Claire was the best thing that was so amazing
And I reckon, you know, also seeing Jessie Buckley win an Oscar for playing Agnes in Hamlet, this character that came from you, Maggie, what is that like?
Oh, my God. I was just elated when that happened. And we were, all of us, you know, all the kind of Hamlet people, we were all sitting in a group and we were all on the edge of our seats because we, you know, she, I mean, she was so powerful. brilliant in that role. I mean, she is Agnes and Agnes is her and she poured herself heart and soul every single day, every single take into it and
I mean, quite apart from the fact she is one of the loveliest people you will ever meet. And I know you don't get Oscars for being lovely, but she's so talented, but also so lovely. So it was just one of the best moments of my life seeing her win that award and get that recognition and go up on stage and be given it. It was just, it was so thrilling.
There's got to be a little bit of a pat on the back for yourself too, right?
Well, I think, you know, I wrote the book and I, yes, but I think this film was such a family effort. You know, it was such a collaboration and Jessie deserves that Oscar and it's her name on the Oscar and it's absolutely right. You know, she took the, Chloe and I took the novel and we made the script and then Jessie took the script and made that role herself.
So she completely deserves all the accolades she's got for it.
Do you want to do more screenwriting? I can imagine a film of Land.
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