In Land, Maggie O’Farrell tells the story of an Irish family striving to make a life on the western coast of Ireland after the Great Hunger. The father, Tomás, an educated man with a deep understanding of the land, is a skilled cartographer. However, he is employed by the British, so with every line and demarcation he draws, Tomás feels he’s dishonoring Ireland by giving ancient places new, English names. And yet, he must support his family. He must earn.
And then one day, Tomás and his young son Liam, his reluctant apprentice, discover in a dense copse a primordial well, and when Tomás touches the water, it brings him great insight. He must make two maps. One for the redcoats, and another one that honors the story of Ireland. But this knowledge brings a kind of madness upon Tomás, and when he emerges from the copse, he is never the same again.
Phina cannot understand what has happened to her husband. Liam wants his father back. Tomás’ experience plunges the family into turmoil.
Eventually, Liam shuns his father’s ambitions for him and turns to the church and the tutelage of the local priest. The eldest daughter Enda, whose keen observations of the world around her would make her a better mapmaking apprentice, yearns for a life beyond her family’s homestead. Dutiful daughter Rose seems destined to never leave it. And even though the youngest child, Eugene, cannot speak, he will eventually possess a deeper understanding of and love for his homeland than them all.
The novel goes beyond one man’s desire to chart a true Ireland. In one family is the story of the land itself, ever-changing, and in the case of the Great Hunger, unable to sustain life.
Most of the family experience an exodus in one way or another. Enda emigrates to North America, where she, alone, struggles to make her way in a different kind of inhospitable land. For her the sea is an end and a beginning, as it will be for all Tomás and Phina’s children.
O’Farrell evokes precise, lingering images, rich with color, rich with the sounds and smells of the land. At times her language echoes the cadence of water—the sea, the loch, the ancient well, the ebb and flow of life itself. And that’s how the story unfolds, it moves ahead, then back, then ahead, almost as with the movement of the ocean.
I loved this book. I loved listening to Dane Whyte O’Hara’s outstanding narration. An Irish voice for an Irish tale. I highly recommend it.