I already know this review is not remotely going to do justice to the book, because this is one of those books which is all about the writing style. The plotline is good too, but it is really secondary to the atmosphere O’Farrell is able to weave, which is mystical, haunting, evocative, and lays its own enchantment on the reader by the spell of her words. It is also a novel which celebrates the geography of the place – somewhere in Ireland – the love of the land, the power of a land which has been settled on for a very long time and which holds the memories of those echoes of its people.
Our protagonist, Tomas, is hired by redcoats – British soldiers – in 1865, to work for the Great Ordnance Survey. Tomas is a skilled cartographer, his current task is to
distil into inked symbols and ordered lines what has taken place here since the first maps ere drawn. These new revisions must contain a cartographic record of the Great Hunger, the disaster that struck this land more than a decade ago now. Tomas must amend the hundreds of households in a barony to the handful that now remain; he must erase row after row of tenant cottages on landowner estates, which have been emptied and dismantled. The redcoats turn their eyes from this task; they prefer never to acknowledge the crisis that befell the country, the losses and deprivations it has suffered. They do not wish to make such marks upon their maps, which might lead to certain admittances. Tomas has determined, however, that his maps will bear an account of what happened what was lost, if it kills him” (p6).
Tomas is extremely skilled at his work, but he resents having to work for redcoats, which he feels is a betrayal. However, he has no other option since he needs to earn money for his family and to pay the rent for the roof over their heads. Like so many others, his landlord is the Viscount, the landed gentry portrayed as oblivious to his tenants suffering, and a harsh and hated master.
The story starts with Tomas doing his surveying work, with 10 year old Liam, his son, as chain boy and apprentice, half unwilling as he is. Liam comes upon a copse, a
cluster of trees tucked into a hollow between two hills” (p9)
Unbeknownst to him, this copse has been inhabited for a very long time, and holds a quality of enchantment still. O’Farrell’s love and reverence for land is demonstrated in her very tender and detailed description about places:
The quality of light in the copse is immediately different, verdant and lustrous, glimmering with the trembling of the leaf canopy. The wind vanishes, as does the relentless rain. He is enclosed and enfolded, as if he has stepped inside the secret green house of a giant. Liam looks up: the tops of the trees separate and collide in the breeze, revealing and concealing the opaline sky. He sees the arrowhead leaves of an aspen entangling with the ripple-edge foliage of an oak, bending together like conspirators. Underfoot, the ground is spongy with damp. It oozes from the soil, the leaf-rot; it sucks and grips at his boot soles. He glances down and sees that there is thick, luxuriant moss, glistening and emerald-bright, blanketing everything: the humps of stone, the long cylinders of fallen branches, the ridged splay of roots, unidentifiable mounds that suggest loaves of bread of animal lairs. Or tiny graves” (ibid).
Liam dislikes surveying work, but learns a lot from his father. His elder sister, Enda, loves this outdoor work but is deemed unfit for it because her father would not train a girl. Their third sibling, Rose, is beautiful and loving, and does not yearn for travel like Enda does. Enda is wild, spirited, defiant, but loving. When they eventually move close to that enchanted copse, a widow living nearby who becomes a sort of guardian angel to their family, gives Enda a fiddle, and she becomes an accomplished musician, one of her few marketable skills.
This move of housing is not to Phina’s liking. Phina, short for Seraphina, is Tomas’ wife, and the girl he rescued from the workhouse and just as she is being sent to a penal colony where women labourers are needed. Phina has a fourth child, Eugene, an unusual boy, with almost no speech, but a depth of understanding which is uncanny. This novel is character-driven, and we come to love each of these six characters as we follow each one in their lives.
The backdrop is the period just after the Great Hunger, but people are still deprived and life is still for most part, hard and cold. This context is offset against the tremendous bond and dependence between the family members, even those who are in conflict, primarily Liam and Tomas. Liam is influenced by the priest, Father Joseph, who once attempted an exorcism on Tomas, and there has been enmity ever since. Father Joseph finds Liam very bright and intelligent, and singles him out at aged 12, influencing him to want to join the novitiate and become a Jesuit priest, to his father’s dismay. Tomas and Phina had put aside papers and money for Liam to emigrate to the colonies, to Quebec, to seek a better life. Instead, he goes to India, as part of his training for priesthood, and we follow the heartbreaking fracturing of this tight-knit little family.
However, it really is not about the plot; this novel is all about the people and the land, and the quality of writing which makes the commonplace luminous and memorable. The writing is dense and rich, descriptions wound round and round but always fascinatingly, and never holding up the pace. The reader is given an experience, not just a story. A lot of the description of places reminds one of Hamnet, and those people’s relationship to land too, and how they draw identity and strength from their familiar and beloved lands. It is therefore, well named, and despite our attachment to these unforgettable characters, they are still depicted as just temporary inhabitants, fleetingly there and gone, as their many ancestors before them…while the land endures.
Land
Maggie O’Farrell
Knopf, 2026.
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