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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Maggie, welcome back to Waterstones.
Thank you very much. It's lovely to be here.
I should point out that whilst people watching this will be watching it in the summer, we're recording it literally a week after you were at the Oscars ceremony for Hamlet.
Chapter 2: What was Maggie O'Farrell's experience at the Oscars?
How are you?
I'm fine. My jet lag, I think, has abated.
Okay.
The whole thing was very strange and very surreal. It's been a bit of a wild ride, but I'm happy to be back in the bookshop.
Okay, good. Happy to be back in a familiar place.
Yeah.
We are here to talk about Land, but I did think it was worth just sort of mentioning Hamlet because the experience that you've had with that book has been a sort of a long road. And your involvement with the film is not just simply because you happened to write the book. You co-wrote the film and therefore you had real skin in the game when it came to the Oscars.
Were you able to enjoy that experience or is it just terrifying from start to finish?
It wasn't terrifying. I mean, it was just very, very strange. It was very strange to be at the Oscars and thinking, oh, look, just in the row in front of me there's Spike Lee, and behind me, oh, Steven Spielberg, just sitting behind me. Yeah, very, very strange. I mean, it's not... It's not really my world, you know, not at all.
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Chapter 3: How does Maggie O'Farrell's family history influence her writing?
But I think it must have been very complicated, I think, for him to be working for the British Army. I imagine it was a source of shame and probably opprobrium from a lot of other people. But in a way, you know, I think... The maps wouldn't... There wouldn't be so much Irish culture and language and history preserved on those maps had people like my great-great-grandfather not worked on them.
Because without people like him, without men like him, they would never have got accurate translations and the names would have been completely anglicised and there would have been a lot of culture and things like sacred wells and...
ancient burial grounds wouldn't have been marked possibly so I don't know I think it's complicated and I would love to talk to him about what it was like and how it felt but I can't so that's what anyway so the imagined dialogue I would have wanted to have with him I wrote a book instead
There is an element to which the writing of a novel is like time travel. So the novelist is able, of course, to control where they're looking and they know that the story they're telling goes here, there and everywhere. And they can experience all those times at the same time when they're writing and decide where to put the reader at various points in the novel.
And you do this quite audaciously in this book, which is after the first section of the book where we think we sort of know where we are and when we are. You take us to a completely different time period, but in the same place, and give us a real sense of how much older the land is than the people that we've met initially.
When you have that control as a novelist, do you have to be quite careful about how you exercise it, the work that's required to decide where to insert the bits of information that the reader needs to understand your story?
I think so. I mean, I'm not much of a planner, either in life or in fiction. I don't know if that shocks you, Will. But I don't really plan. I don't plan a book before I start, usually. And I kind of plan it as I go along. And I research things as I go along. I always feel you don't really know what it is you're doing until you're doing it.
And you don't know how much you don't know until you get right in the thick of it. And so I suppose it's a bit similar that I always knew that I wanted with this novel to go right back to the very, very earliest people who lived in Ireland, partly because... my father would only ever read Irish myths to us when we were children.
You know, I used to beg him to read Pippi Longstocking or the movements, but he never would. He'd only read Irish myths. But in a way, you know, it annoyed me at the time, but now I'm kind of glad that happened because the Irish myths are my kind of storytelling DNA. It feels like the earliest, for me, the earliest way to tell a story. And they are so strange and...
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