Land —
Maggie O'Farrell
Maggie O'Farrell's
follow-up to Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait moves into nineteenth-century
Ireland, following a mapmaker, Tomás, commissioned by the British to survey the
country in the aftermath of the Great Famine alongside his reluctant son. What begins
as an official cartographic project turns into something closer to a
reclamation, an attempt to record the land's true history rather than simply
chart it for colonial purposes.
O'Farrell's prose, widely
praised across her career for its density and lyricism, is doing much of the
work here; the novel moves across timescales, generational and geological,
weaving in folklore and a persistent sense of haunting alongside its historical
material. Critics have generally responded to the book as a formally ambitious
expansion of what O'Farrell has done in her recent historical novels, with
several suggesting it may be her strongest bid yet for major literary prizes.
Not every reviewer has
been won over. Some have found the novel's emotional register more diffuse than
focused, more interested in atmosphere and feeling than in the accumulation of
narrative tension, and the occasionally anachronistic language given to its
nineteenth-century characters has drawn specific criticism. Even among more
mixed responses, though, the ambition of the project is rarely in dispute.
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