-5535.jpg?w=810&resize=810&ssl=1 "Sense of Place: Maggie O’Farrell on the Irish landscapes that shaped her new novel")
Books not only inspire where we travel: in the best ones, landscape becomes a character all of its own. In our Sense of Place series, authors talk about the importance of location in their work. Here, Maggie O’Farrell discusses Ireland, the setting for her new book, Land.
“Writing about Ireland always slightly worried me, because I was born but not bred there,” says Maggie O’Farrell, who started life in Coleraine but left when she was very young. “I used to go back every year – I had relatives in Donegal, Galway and Dublin – and, obviously, my name instantly identifies me as someone from Ireland. But because I didn’t grow up there, I felt I wouldn’t be able to write about it with any proper authority. And then with this book, I just knew it was the story I wanted to tell, and it could never be anywhere else.”
It’s been a big year for O’Farrell, one in which she transcended the boundaries between cult writer and cultural icon. The film of her book Hamnet – which she adapted for the screen with director Chloé Zhao – left audiences emotionally bruised, and garnered several Oscar nominations, with Jessie Buckley winning for her portrayal of Shakespeare’s wife Agnes. Now comes the release of her 10th novel, Land, which takes O’Farrell back to her ancestral mother country of Ireland, and for which the film rights have already been snapped up.
The book shares some of the same touchpoints as Hamnet and many of her other works – how individual lives both influence and are subsumed into the great ebb and flow of history; grief, ghosts and giving voice to the voiceless; the fine line between the natural and the supernatural – except this time the protagonists aren’t based on historical figures such as Shakespeare’s son or Browning’s last duchess, but her own family.
“All families have their myths, and the one that we were told as children was that my great-great-grandfather had drawn the first maps of Ireland – as if he’d operated as a single entity and done the whole thing on his own,” she says. “And I just thought about how true that might be. A lot of myth is a mix of fiction and embellishment, but often has a seed in truth. I wanted to explore that, but could never really find a way into it; it didn’t feel like it had a pulse. And then, one day, I suddenly saw a way to do it.”
