Beautiful: ‘Land’ by Maggie O’Farrell
How can we understand the deep scars associated with trauma such as famine? Or the connections that people feel with their homeland – not the nation, but the actual piece of land on which they are born and raised?
Maggie O’Farrell’s latest work does this, as well as touching on Irish myth from deep time, incorporating a little ‘magical realism’ (for want of a better term), along with geography and history. All in one big, beautiful novel.
The description ‘family saga’ comes to mind as well, because the story encompasses the connections of a single family to a piece of land on a peninsula on Ireland’s west coast. The roots of the narrative reach back, far back to prehistory and myth, but the main protagonists first appear to the reader in 1865.
This is a time when the scars of the Great Hunger, the devastating potato blight and resulting famine of the 1840s, are still very much apparent, in all that is missing: people, houses, villages, crops. Tomás and his wife Phina meet as children in the orphanage, where they’d been taken after their families perish from hunger. Their origin stories are both beautiful and sorrowful.
Two decades later, they have young children of their own and Tomás is employed by the British to work on what was called the Ordnance Survey project, aimed at mapping the whole of Ireland, which had never been done before. He is a skilled cartographer though of course receives almost no recognition or proper payment for his abilities – British names sign off on his work and his status is ‘labourer’. Such is life in a colonised Ireland.
The book’s blurb describes what happens to Tomás while mapping the peninsula that forms so much of the novel’s backdrop as: an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. It is a hint of the coming dramas that will be visited on the family, and vague because readers are left to draw their own conclusions about what actually takes place in that secluded spot, though the results are very clearly tumultuous.
It is also where some of the book’s themes, such as the importance of land, and connection, and how the land and waters remember, are introduced. Every member of the family will grapple with these over their lives, with varying outcomes.
This beautiful and surprising book is full of gorgeous prose, vivid characters and especially, luminous and finely drawn landscapes:
A skein of marsh birds passes over his head, their cries a dissonant plucking on untuned instruments. Liam tilts his head, tracking their progress as they veer and bank over the green inclines and fields, towards the cragged cliffs that fall off into the pounding sea: a sole geometric shape moving among grand and yielding irrregularities. How radiant, how lovely is the land – and yet how empty. It is as if he has passed through a rent into another realm where humans are unknown, where he is the only one, and will have to make the best of it.
Land p13Maggie O’Farrell is fast becoming a favourite author for me. Land is a delight of a book.
It was published by Tinder Press in 2026.You may be interested in my review of Hamnet, also by Maggie O’Farrell.
And here is a short clip of the author speaking about Land.
Thought-provoking: ‘Land’ by Simon Winchester
The new book by prolific non fiction author Simon Winchester takes a sweeping look at the topic of land in a broad sense. Subtitled How the hunger for ownership shaped the modern world, the book’s opening introduces the author’s personal take on his ownership of a piece of land in northeastern USA, and in the process introduces the sorry history of the dispossession of the First Nations people in that corner of America.
Coming back to fundamentals, the author then tells the story of how the Earth was first measured; a tale of mathematics and precise instruments put to the task in the nineteenth century.
Then came the astonishing proposal to create a common map of the world – ‘a common map for a common humanity’ – put forward by Professor Albrecht Penck, an Austrian geographer. It was not surprising to learn that this project, embarked upon with such lofty idealism, was a fraught endeavour that eventually foundered on the rocks of divisions, rancour, rivalry and ineptitude after nearly a century of effort.
Winchester examines what makes borders; how human-created borders have resulted in absurdities and bloodshed; how in more recent times and with huge effort, the Dutch created land to live on and farm from the North Sea; the link between land and national identity and ways of doing things.
He returns to America to recount the brutal disgrace of settler land grabs and broken treaties in the westward movement of the nineteenth century; then explains the legacies of enclosure laws and clearances in England and Scotland; the effects of colonialism in various parts of the world including Australia, New Zealand, the African continent, India and Pakistan and the Middle East.
The book is full of startling snippets of information like this:
A quarter of the world’s population lives on land in which, though individual citizens may not know it, they exist in a notionally feudal relationship with the British Crown.
Land p195That quote alone should fire up the passions of supporters of the idea of Australia becoming a republic!
Almost every part of the world is included in the embrace of this book: from the Ukraine (Stalin’s disastrous and murderous ‘collectivisation’ of farms in the 1930’s), to the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII; the contradictions and confusions of the Treaty of Waitangi, struck with New Zealand’s Maoris; and the destruction caused by industrialisation and exploitation of the Earth’s resources across the globe.
Winchester argues that the once firmly held belief that ‘land is the only thing that lasts’ is no longer true, due to rising sea levels and encroachment on low lying regions and islands. He offers examples of changing attitudes and methods of managing and conserving land, including from my own part of the world, Australia: widespread catastrophic bushfires in the summer of 2019-20 have led to a re-think of fire management and a growing respect for traditional ‘cool burning’ methods practised here for thousands of years by First Nations people.
Land is an engrossing and thought provoking read. Readers who enjoy learning about history, geography, maps, as well as the contradictions of human behaviour, will enjoy the mix of anecdote and analysis with which Winchester packs a lot of information into a very readable package.
Land is published by William Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, in January 2021.
My thanks to the publishers for a review copy.
