Reading Maggie O’Farrell’s quiet epic of family, grief and the soil beneath our feet
I read “Land” by Maggie O’Farrell and ended it with the rare feeling that I wanted to go back to page one and slowly go through it all again.
There are lines in this novel that stay with you, particularly the moment when O’Farrell writes that the peninsula is proof that everything was once something else; nothing is lost.
“This house is a thing both ancient and disjointed, and entity of addition and subtraction, a palimpsest of stone and wood and caulk and mud, Its existence here, on the the peninsula, is proof that everything was once something else: nothing goes away.”
The story is about Tomás, his wife Phina and their four children in the years after the Great Hunger. Tomás is working for the British as a surveyor until he has a strange encounter at a hidden spring which upsets him so much that he gives up the security of his job. What follows is a family torn apart and reformed by the land they inhabit. Every child grows into an adult in ways no parent could have imagined. Liam was brought up to walk in his father’s footsteps, but he wants out. Edna runs to Quebec to find her own future. Rose teeters between innocence and responsibility. But Eugene is the quietest of all, the one who really understands the land and the life his parents wanted him to have.
The novel shifts across time, memory and perspective with a fluidity that is almost eerie and dream-like. The physical weight of the landscape is so written into the book that it becomes a character in itself. Each page is woven with the history of Ireland, its scars and its resilience. The book discusses the struggles that Ireland faced in the 1800s and also how everything that we experience in life will always stay with us.
I found emotional honesty worked best for me. The tragedies are constant, but never without cause. O’Farrell has a gift for anchoring huge historical trauma in small, everyday objects. A wedding ring, buried. A violin. A family dog who seems to live on through generations. These details make the story feel lived, not told.
The novel is not a fast read, but I thought the slow pace was deliberate. It asks you to sit with the land, with the grief, and with the silences that make a family. If you like atmospheric, character-driven historical fiction with elements of folklore and magical realism, you will enjoy this.
“Their feet press down into the thick, blackened leaf-fall. Around them, the golden air is stitched with pollen and the inexplicable flight paths of bees, and teems with the sounds of a forest: birdsong, the creak of branches, the insistent tapping of a woodpecker, the drip of moisture from foliage, the secretive rustle of unseen creatures moving about the undergrowth.”
“Land” changed me in a small but important way. It reminded me that the places we come from and the memories we carry don’t go away. They anchor and chart the course of who we are.
