‘A ghost-self walks alongside you’: Maggie O’Farrell on Hamnet, Land, and the maps we carry within
Land is a novel sparked by the discovery that O’Farrell’s great-great grandfather was an Irish cartographer
Author of the Oscar-winning adaptation Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell is one of the most acclaimed novelists of our generation. (By special arrangement) In Map, Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska writes:
I like maps, because they lie.
Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly
they spread before me a world
not of this world.
It is the kind of cartography that Maggie O’Farrell has always been fascinated by: not just the sort that traces landscapes, pencils in borders and marks out empires, but also the kind that maps what lies within — the particular topography of grief, of longing and loss, of small cruelties and a hundred indecisions.
It is what had led the British-Irish novelist to Hamnet, her moving pandemic novel on the life and death of William Shakespeare’s only son from bubonic plague at the age of 11, its devastating effect on his mother Agnes and how it led Shakespeare to one of his greatest works, Hamlet. Now, six years and another novel later, it has brought her to Land, a novel sparked by the discovery that O’Farrell’s great-great grandfather was an Irish cartographer, drafted in by the British Ordnance Survey to map Ireland in the early 1860s, soon after the country had been blighted by the Great Hunger.
“I’ve been thinking about writing about it for 10-15 years. But for a long time, I couldn’t see a way to fictionalise it. It was when I went to the archives in Dublin, there was so much information — field notes, draft maps, drawings and measurements — that it became real. Even then, I couldn’t tell which of it might have been my great-great grandfather’s work because the British did not let the Irish cartographers sign their work. I did find his signature on an administrative memorandum that was sent to labourers — the Irish people were called labourers — even though my great-great-grandfather was educated. Just finding that piece of paper with his signature on it and holding it in my hands was extraordinary. It was also proof that the family myth did have seeds in truth,” says O’Farrell, 54, over a Zoom interview.
The latest novel Land is sparked by the discovery that Maggie O’Farrell’s great-great grandfather was an Irish cartographer. (Express Photo)
At its heart, Land is a novel about who gets to write history, whose labour is recorded, whose grief makes it on to the page. The act of mapmaking becomes a subversive form of resistance against erasure. From abandoned towns to mass graves, O’Farrell’s protagonist Tomás puts in the maps the human cost of the famine that devastated the land.
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