The title of Land, Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th novel, carries much weight. We start on a windswept peninsula in the west of Ireland in the 1860s, where Tomás and his 10-year-old son, Liam, are helping the British Ordnance Survey compile accurate mapping of the district. We know two things from the opening pages. One is that when Liam grows up he is going to be “on the other side of the world, with a new name and unfamiliar clothes, facing a committee of robed men who have come to sit in judgement on him”.
And we know, too, from the portentous way in which landscape and weather are described, that father and son are going to draw a map which tells the true story of the land, which has been occupied by the “redcoats”.
The robed figures who will interrogate the grown-up Liam are the Jesuits. After a strange childhood, he decides, as many clever boys from Ireland did in the 19th and 20th centuries, to become a priest and go to India, where he loses his faith — hence the tribunal.
His father was a skilled cartographer, and during that rainswept week staying in a widow’s house on that western peninsula, something rum happens. During one of their days of surveying, Tomás disappears. Some days later he is brought back to the widow’s house in a strange condition. We assume — they all assume — that he is blotto. But he isn’t. He has been to a magic well — a tobar — and drunk from the mystic past. He is never going to be the same again. This taciturn man never says what has happened, but nor (I found this a bit annoying) does O’Farrell explain.
The mystery of the magic well
Can I attempt to interpret the message of the magic well? Because, unless you have some clue what this message is, then the achingly slow narrative is incomprehensible. Behind the rolling years of history, British occupation or colonisation of Ireland, the Great Hunger, the imprisonment of the Irish soul by the priests, the comings and goings — English viscounts, Vikings, monks — there has always been some other Ireland yearning for freedom, speaking to us through its grass, its weather, its birds, its dewdrops and its peasantry. Tomás has somehow seen this, and so the attempt to draw a map of the place for the Ordnance Survey can not be the whole truth.
Tomás marries a girl with whom he fell in love at first sight, Seraphina or Phina. They have merely glimpsed one another in a workhouse, where she is renamed Frances and where the wicked authorities shave off her beautiful golden hair. When she and Tomás find freedom, they live together in Dublin, but Tomás wants to take them back to the peninsula where he had his moment of epiphany by the well.
The doom-laden family history makes the darkest Thomas Hardy novel seem positively Wodehousian. Tomás loses his hand. Of his four children, none are happy and they all leave Ireland. Unlike Hardy or Wodehouse, O’Farrell does not feel the need to create interesting characters, so, as one predictable disaster follows another, we feel no closer to feeling much sympathy, except for their dear old dog. Much is made of Tomás’s taciturnity. He withholds because what he has perceived, and what he has to say would be too painful to disclose.
Liam’s vocation to the priestly life began when Father Joseph (who had tried to exorcise Tomás) helps him translate Pliny’s Natural History, a passage which explains how, through earthquakes and the movement of seas, new lands are formed and reformed.
As a secularised man, back in Dublin, forever separated from his family and their past, it becomes his task, as he works once more as a cartographer, to unlock the “true” story of “the Land” and to redraw the map, rather as Pliny sees nature itself re-fashioning the surface of the Earth.
A N Wilson is a writer and columnist; anwilson.substack.com
