“The morning had been a long one. Liam and his father out since dawn. A north-westerly breeze has been at them for hours, scrupulous in its self-appointed work of lifting the caps from their heads, in hurling a scree of water over them. Liam stood on what he would call a hillock and his father a drumlin, or tulach, holding the end of the chain and the surveying pole in hands that are scarlet with cold.”
That’s a passage from the first page of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Land. The story begins in Ireland in 1865, shortly after the Great Hunger. Ten-year-old Liam is helping his father with his surveying work for the Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland and its changes.
Liam has two sisters, Enda, with a restless spirit who becomes a master at the violin, and Rose, a homebody, and one younger brother, who is in tune with all that is around him but never speaks. Early in the story, Liam’s father goes a little crazy and is forced to endure an exorcism by the local priest. This leaves a lasting impression on Liam who, against his family’s wishes, leaves home at 18 to enter the priesthood.
The author paints a vivid picture of the life path for each family member. O’Farrell is one of those writers whose rich writing is a cut above the rest. If you’ve read her Hamnet, then you’ll know what I mean. As the book jacket says, it’s “a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It’s a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog,”
If you’re looking for one of those rare, beautifully written novels, then you must read Land by Maggie O’Farrell.
