Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What inspired Maggie O'Farrell's latest novel Land?
After an award-laden spring which brought a claim to the film adaptation of her novel Hamnet, my next guest hopes that summer will bring readers and critics alike to enjoy her new novel which is called Land and which has just been published. Maggie O'Farrell, you're very welcome to the programme.
Thank you so much for having me, Pat.
Now, I've been lucky enough to have had a copy of your book for a few weeks now, so I've enjoyed it very much. And I realise the genesis of the novel is actually to be found within your own family.
Chapter 2: Who was Maggie O'Farrell's great-great-grandfather Tomás?
Will you tell us about your great-great-grandfather, Tomás?
Yes, with pleasure. We were always told as a child, as children, you know, and I think all families have their myths that one of our antecedents drew the first ever map of Ireland as if he was just a lone man band, which obviously is very far from the truth. But I used to imagine, as you can probably tell from the way I speak, I was born in Ireland, but I didn't grow up there.
But we used to come back every summer and I would look out of the window of our little car at, I don't know, Kerry or Donegal or Galway going past.
Chapter 3: How does family history influence O'Farrell's writing?
And I would imagine him as this lone person striding up a mountainside, probably with a kind of 20 centimetre ruler in his hand or something like that. But obviously that was a complete fantasy. And I did go looking for him. slightly more seriously recently. And I went to the... So the archives in Dublin hold the Ordnance Survey records for Ireland.
And it took me a while to find him because if you work for the Ordnance Survey, which, of course, is a British government, British army-run organisation... If you worked for them and you were Irish, you weren't allowed to sign your own work. It had to be signed by a British army officer. So he was hard to find.
But I did, in a list of labourers, underneath a memorandum about paid leave, I did find his signature.
Chapter 4: What challenges did Tomás face while mapping Ireland?
And it was an extraordinary moment, Pat, because it proved that actually there is a seed of truth in myth. that my family wasn't making this up. And also, it was an amazing feeling to be touching a piece of paper that I knew he had touched at one point.
You also remarked, strangely, and it shows what DNA can do, that his handwriting was remarkably similar to your own.
Yes, I mean, actually, in those days, they all had this incredible kind of slanting, very beautiful copperplate script. I mean, I would love to say mine is as neat as that. It's not. But there is a weird, there was a weird similarity, certainly. Mine's a lot messier, I have to say.
But you'd already found a clue on a map that was framed of your uncle, which you'd overlooked, the whole family had overlooked, until you espied it.
Chapter 5: How does the Great Hunger shape the narrative in Land?
Yes. So hanging in my parents' house, it was my uncle's who passed away and he left it to my dad. And so hanging in our house is a map drawn by, in the book, he's called Tomas and his son is called Liam, who's based on my great grandfather. And so he, his son had drawn a map, which is in the style of an OS map of an imaginary place.
And it's been hanging there for years and I've passed it hundreds of times back and forth. And one day, a few years ago, I don't really know why, I decided to look at it with a magnifying glass. And in the top corner of it is a little kind of medallion about the size of an old postage stamp. And when you look at it through a magnifying glass, you can see that there's a portrait inside it of...
my great-great-grandfather. And, I mean, it must have been done with a brush of maybe two or three bristles.
Chapter 6: What themes are explored in the family saga of Land?
It's so tiny. And he's standing behind a British soldier in a red coat and the soldier is looking through a theodolite. And it was just astonishing because there he has been, hiding in plain sight all these years. And it's quite a politically freighted portrait because standing behind Tomás looks quite anxious and
and the soldier was looking through a theodolite and it was just, I was absolutely flabbergasted to find it there.
Now, it is set in the years post-famine and, you know, 30% of the population eliminated, whole villages decimated and falling to ruin. So what happened at the time, the Ordnance Survey wanted to update the reality of things on the ground. And your great-great-grandfather was one of those recruited by the Redcoats to do this work. It's an extraordinary time.
I mean, echoed, I suppose, in Brian Friel's play Translations, which was talking about the same episode, really.
Chapter 7: How does Maggie O'Farrell reflect on her Irish heritage?
Yeah, so the Ordnance Survey did their first version of the map and they started in 1820. And they originally thought it was going to take them seven years to map Ireland. It actually took them over 22 years for many reasons. The project overran and overran, partly because when they first started, they had an edict that no Irish people were to be employed on the project.
And they soon ran into lots of trouble with this because obviously the British army had problems communicating with local people. And also it was run by the army. So local people were understandably quite alarmed when they saw a large army division suddenly, you know, roll into town.
And I have read accounts that they would spend, the British surveyors would spend, you know, days, perhaps even weeks setting up their trig point, which is the point, you know, the... sort of geographical location for ensuring that the measurements and the distances are accurate.
Chapter 8: What are Maggie O'Farrell's thoughts on the Hamnet film adaptation?
So they would set it up. And I have read accounts of that sometimes during night, locals would just move it a few feet just to mess with them. So obviously the project became very bogged down and very problematic. So they had to employ people. They realised that it had to employ Irish people and particularly Irish speakers on this project. And my great-grandfather was one of them.
And, you know, so the first map of Ireland was finished in the very early 1840s. And then, of course, as we all know, this enormous tragedy struck the country. And those maps... among the many, many effects of the Great Hunger, the maps were obsolete because, as you say, the human and physical geography of Ireland was completely reconfigured.
And so it was very important to almost straightaway to make revisions to it. And so I realised that my great-great-grandfather began his employment with the OS in the later years of the famine, and that just stopped me in my tracks. I couldn't understand...
What that task must have been like, you know, to be setting down those villages that had been erased, the million people who died, between a million and two million people who'd been forced to emigrate. I mean, just, you know, cartographically to make a record of that must have been a very, very difficult task.
And in the book, your great-great-grandfather, Thomas, is determined to try to retain elements of the land that might vanish under this new mapping system.
Yes. I mean, you know, obviously mapping is a very, very complicated task. I mean, it's, you know, part algebra, it's part mathematics, it's part linguistics, it's part history and folklore. And in Ireland, I think it was particularly complicated for, you know, political colonialist reasons.
And I, you know, it was a question in my mind is what must it have been like to be an Irishman working on that project? And I think in a sense, I came to the conclusion that In a way, it was very, very good that Irishmen did work on it because otherwise so much would have been lost.
You know, so much of the linguistic and folkloric and historical roots of names would have been lost if they hadn't. And there was a toponomy branch that had been set up in Dublin before. by a man called John O'Donovan, and he was an Irish language scholar and he insisted on absolute rigour in place names and meanings and their connection to the land and these towns and settlements past.
And, of course, when we have anglicized versions of those names now, we can trace their origins to maybe the topography of the land in which they are situated, which is great. But it reminds me, strangely, in a different way of Donald Trump. He goes to America. Well, his family goes to America. And they were drumfts. D-R-U-M-F-T's. They were drumfts.
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