I’ve been thinking recently about societies in collapse, and how they recover. Maggie O’Farrell’s Land is set in Ireland in 1865, some fifteen years after the Irish Famine (or as O’Farrell calls it, The Great Hunger) which caused the collapse of the predominantly (but not exclusively) Catholic Irish peasant economy, particularly in southern and western Ireland. Although it did not disturb the landlord and Ascendancy class particularly, it was disastrous for tenant farmers and small landholders, leading to the deaths of perhaps one million, and the emigration of a further million people (see fascinating Great Irish Famine Online site)
The book opens in 1865 with Tomás, a tenant farmer who was the sole survivor of the famine in his family. He is working as a surveyor with the British government on the Ordnance Survey in Ireland, which is redrawing its maps in the wake of the eviction and emigration which followed the famine. He hates the British government, but it is a form of income to eke out the meagre yield of his tenant farm. He has with him his young son Liam, who is assisting him with holding the surveying chains as they work their way across the countryside, asking the remaining farmers about the families who had lived in what are now ruins. Liam wanders off into a densely wooded copse which has somehow survived the timber-felling avarice of the landlord, and he and then his father come across a deep, sacred pool which seems to hold the history of Ireland over millenia and the stirring of Celtic mythology within its waters. Somehow Tomás has been deeply affected by what he saw in that pool and it triggers a restlessness and other-worldliness in him that affects his whole family. His mapmaking becomes an act of subversion by establishing as fact what has been obliterated.
The book traces the lives of this family as his wife Phina, whom he met as a child in an orphanage after her family had died or emigrated, and his four children Enda, Liam, Rose and Eugene. He moves the family from their city tenement room to a disused cottage on the peninsula where he encountered the pool, only to have the family disintegrate anew through death, emigration and capture by the Catholic Church that Tomás hated so much.
The book moves chronologically, shifting from one character to another, told in the present tense. The tone is reminiscent, as you might expect, of O’Farrell’s book Hamnet (my review here) and Instructions for a Heatwave (my review here). There is a lot of description, and relatively little dialogue. She introduces major plot developments abruptly, which I prefer as being the way things happen, instead of heavy foreshadowing. I liked that she leaves the ending open, and I did find myself caring about the characters. I’m surprised that it wasn’t longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize as many predicted: she doesn’t seem to do very well with the Booker, having never been longlisted. However, I’ve never lost my ambivalence about O’Farrell’s writing which seems to reach for, but not attain, the complexity and elan of, say, Hilary Mantel’s work.
My rating: 8/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
Read because: I thought I’d try to get ahead of the Booker Prize Longlist 2026, but it didn’t make it. It wouldn’t have been a bad inclusion for the longlist, but I don’t see it as a shortlist nomination.
