Title: Land by Maggie O'Farrell
Book beginning/First Line Friday quote:
His father was ever the man of a few words. Even when Liam is on the other side of the world, with a new name unfamiliar clothes, facing a committee of robed men who have come to sit in judgement of him, he will be able to recall the astonishing day that turned his father garrulous.
Friday56 quote:
Tomás will not repent. He has nothing to repent for: he is as certain of this as he is of his own name, as he is of the orientation of magnetic north.
Summary:
On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.
The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse of trees. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?
Land is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. (Publisher)
Review:
O'Farrell, author of Hamnet, opens her latest book with the above epigraph -- the definition of the Irish word "seanchaí". It seems to me that the author has assigned herself as the custodian of tradition and a reciter of ancient lore in her book Land. And it may explain the way that the story often uses fable-like elements even when the majority of it is very realistic. Though the story uses the omniscient 3rd person style, sometimes the point of view shifts from its human characters to dogs, the house, the land, even an unborn baby. The land looks back into prehistory and then later it zooms the story forward way past the lives of the characters in Tomás' family. these time shifts are a bit confusing.
The book begins with Liam, the oldest son in the family, looking back on the day when everything shifted for him and his family...the day his father stepped into a magical copse of trees and drank from a well he found there. This well seemed to have magical abilities and creatures one might expect to find in Celtic mythology. When Tomás, an Irishman, emerged from the forest he was a changed man, one determined to no longer work for the English by making their maps for them. But his mapmaking was how Tomás supported his family: Phina, the mother, Liam his son, daughters Enda and Rose, and an unborn son Eugene. Ultimately the episode in the copse also led Tomás to sell everything and move his family, against their wishes, out of Dublin to the lonely plot of land near the special, magical forest.
The scene from the Friday56 quote is during an attempted exorcism by a Catholic priest on Tomás. It is the first of a lifetime of disasters which befall the family, perhaps as a way to highlight Ireland's dismal history. Fortunately the book ends on a sweet, positive note, otherwise I'd say a lot of the story is very dark.
I thought the writing was beautiful and would often find myself swept up in the epic story. I also found it a tremendously hard book to read very fast. I just poked along for over a month making little progress even though I was listening to the audiobook. That is the second week in a row where I've confessed to my slow reading. Maybe it is me, not the books? My rating: 4 stars.
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| At 400 pages, this qualifies for Big Book Summer Challenge |
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