The starting point for novelist Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th book was a desire to find out more about her own family’s history. This quest became a full-scale expedition into the unmapped territory of every soul seeking a sense of belonging.
On the surface, Land is the epic tale of an Irish mapmaker, his wife and their four children. But beneath it all runs the universal story of things frequently lost and occasionally rediscovered — history, memory, land, family, home, identity, love, faith, and the very self.
The novel opens in 1865, when Tomás, working for the British ordnance survey office in the south-west of Ireland, is visiting a remote peninsula to redraw maps that reflect the geographic changes that have occurred since half the Irish population died or emigrated during the Great Famine.
O’Farrell says, “I set out to write a novel about a family surviving after this disaster, but I also wanted to recount the entire history of a country via one plot of land as well as describe the different ways of the people who settled on it. I wanted to address the micro and the macro.
“History books talk a lot about the people who left and the people who died, and rightly so. There are many accounts and statistics. But what interested me with this novel was the people who stayed. I was trying to imagine their lives.”
After a transcendental experience on the peninsula he is mapping, Tomás moves his family there, renting an abandoned cottage he rescues from ruin, a dwelling set against a standing stone with a history far more ancient than he could dream of.
O’Farrell evokes the house as a living witness of history. She writes, “[It was] a thing both ancient and disjointed, an entity of addition and subtraction, a palimpsest of stone and wood and caulk and mud. Its existence here, on the peninsula, is proof that everything was once something else: nothing goes away.”
O’Farrell’s own family history was integral to the birth of Land.
“When I found out my great-grandfather had started working for the ordnance survey in 1848, that date really stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to be mapping in those years, considering why the maps needed to be revised — to account for this cataclysm and this massive population change, the geography changing. I wanted to focus on the stories of people who stayed in the country: how they survived, how they went on under that huge shadow cast by this disaster.”
Tracking down her great-grandfather’s maps was not easy, “because the records from those times are quite scant”. She says, “One of the biggest stumbling blocks was finding out that if you were Irish and worked for the British ordnance survey in the early 19th century, you weren’t allowed to sign your own work — it had to be signed by a British officer. I went through a huge number of field books and maps, going, ‘Well, that looks a bit like his handwriting, but I’m not sure … ’”
She says this frustrating labour gave her “a sense of maplessness”, with her having no clear idea of where she was or what direction she should take.
“I could see his name in ledgers, and I could see his signature on pay slips, but in this mountain of material I couldn’t find his actual work.”
Then she had a surprising breakthrough.
“One of the records in Dublin suggested that some of the personnel were sent to Scotland and, since that’s where I live, I thought that maybe I should go to the Edinburgh archives, just to see if there was anything there. I went along and said, ‘I’m looking for this man, these papers’, and they wheeled out this huge stack of field books and maps and said, ‘Yeah, here they are.’ I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘What? This is all him?’ And they said, ‘Yes, yes.’ Because in Scotland he was allowed to sign his own name. I’d been looking for this man for 15 years, and I found all this information about a mile from my house. It was extraordinary. It was like a crock of gold.”
Much of this detail informs the book, but Land resonates beyond the time it maps. O’Farrell says the novel is not just about the place itself, and what happens to the place, but also about what happens to people when they shift from the place where they were born.
“It’s hard to disentangle the two: self and place. I think as humans we have a very strong sense of that.
“It is perhaps the same kind of need described by the poet TS Eliot in Four Quartets: ‘We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.’”
Towards the end of his life, O’Farrell’s fictional mapmaker Tomás becomes desperate to find the unremembered place he was born.
She writes, “If he cannot have his map of the land, he would like at least this map of himself. It burns within him, the desire to find where he is from, to walk the soil where he began.”
The same yearning is echoed by Tomás’s son, Liam, as he attempts to close the circle of his family’s wanderings: “Always, Liam carries within him the idea of what life might have been had his family stayed in the Lanes, who he might have been if he had never come west, never seen his father strapped to a table, never fallen under the spell of a resentful, score-settling priest. It is a lost self, a ghost twin, that Liam.”
O’Farrell says she is sure many people feel as Liam does in her book.
“If you happen to grow up in a place different from the one you were born in, or if you have an accent that doesn’t match your name, I think there’s always a kind of ghost self that walks along beside you. You often think, ‘Who would I be if we’d stayed? What would I have been like? I would sound different. I would be different.’ I think you can never really get away from that if you leave your country of birth when you’re very small.”
She speaks from personal experience. Born in Coleraine in Northern Ireland, she grew up in Wales and Scotland, returning to Ireland only during the summer holidays.
“I feel quite Irish when I’m in Britain, and I feel quite British when I’m in Ireland, because of the way I speak. There’s a sense in which I don’t quite know where it is I’m from. When people ask where someone is from, they usually expect a one-word answer, but I have to give a paragraph.
“There are so many people in the world like this. I’m always quite fascinated by people who are very rooted in one place and have been for generations. I can’t really imagine it.”
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