Maggie O’Farrell’s tenth novel Land is a sprawling family saga. It traverses the landmarks of 19th century Irish history, including the Great Famine – with its corollary, incarceration in the workhouse – and the mapping of Ireland via the Ordnance Survey .
The story is inspired by O’Farrell’s discovery that her great-great-grandfather worked on the survey. Carried out between 1824 and 1846, the survey sought to determine the boundaries of townships based on a uniform system, so the British colonisers could more accurately administer land-based tax.
As part of its mission of standardisation, it instituted spelling more palatable to English speakers. The maps it produced entrenched the Anglicisation of place names , which had been occurring since the 12th century.
Review: Land – Maggie O'Farrell (Hachette)
O’Farrell, who was born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, in 1972, just months after Bloody Sunday , has drawn on her Irish heritage in two of her previous novels: Instructions for a Heatwave (2013) and This Must Be The Place (2016).
Homecoming is a central theme in both. In the former, the O’Riordan family decamps from London to a historic family cottage in Connemara to wrestle with a long-buried family secret. In the latter, a linguist’s return to Donegal to collect his grandfather’s ashes leads to him starting a new family in his ancestral homeland.
In Land, O’Farrell ramps up the theme of homecoming. Opening in 1865, the novel loops backwards and forwards in time to track the lives of Tomás, a surveyor, and his children Liam, Rose, Enda and Eugene.
An imagined Irishness
As its title suggests, Land is concerned with how the Irish make themselves at home in a landscape they have been culturally and legally disenfranchised from, through the colonial system of tenant farming. The novel is undergirded by a spirit of resistance to the survey as a colonial project. It privileges the perspective and experiences of the Irish underclass.
Tomás is compelled to work for the survey out of economic necessity. He is useful to his employers because he is a native Irish speaker who can extract knowledge from the locals about “where the boundaries lie, who owns which field, what this valley or that bluff is called and why, where might the ruins of this building be”.
He experiences a crisis of conscience when he comes across a well, or “ tobar ”, in a copse and glimpses something that puts him in contact with Gaelic mythology. He becomes determined to complete his own mapping project – one that more accurately reflects local knowledge, traditions and history.
In her latest novel, Maggie O'Farrell invokes Ireland’s mythical past.
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In depicting these competing ways of knowing the landscape, O’Farrell returns to the motif of the palimpsest – an overwritten text – which she has employed to great effect in many of her previous novels.
The palimpsest is an established metaphor in Irish historiography and literature. It captures the successive waves of foreign invasion from the Vikings, Normans, Celts and British, as well as recurring moments of violent unrest, from the Catholic rebellion of 1798 to the Easter Rising of 1916 and the more recent Troubles .
It also encapsulates what Irish literature scholar Vicki Mahaffey terms “mythstory”: the persistent intertwining of myth and history. Irish literature often conveys this complexity by portraying a present haunted by a many-layered past.
Land embraces “mythstory”, but in an oversimplified way. Rather than presenting Irish history and culture as products of many interwoven influences, the novel promotes an imagined Irishness rooted in Gaelic place names and folklore.
O’Farrell invokes the Gaelic tradition of the seanchaí – a traditional Irish storyteller – to construct Gaelic culture in opposition to that of the British settlers. As the novel’s epigraph outlines, the seanchaí is a custodian of tradition and history: a “reciter of ancient lore”.
Tomás resembles a seanchaí in the way he becomes a repository for local knowledge and Gaelic place names in danger of being overwritten by the survey. The narrative, too, incorporates mythical elements in the manner of the seanchaí tradition, providing a sense of continuity from ancient times to the novel’s present. The well assumes a spiritual significance. It evokes life beyond ordinary human time, transporting those attuned to its uncanny powers to a kind of afterlife in a mythical realm.
Simplistic characterisations
The novel’s reassertion of Gaelic language and culture in opposition to the culture of the British colonisers relies on simplistic characterisations of both the Irish and the British.
In the throes of an apparent breakdown, Tomás becomes a mouthpiece for the book’s central theme, murmuring “myth is fact and fact is myth, and both are embodied in the land itself”.
The English, on the other hand, are always referred to as “redcoats”. They appear as caricatured villains, who casually deploy…
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