In Review: Maggie O’Farrell’s Land

By Eleanor Davies

Land is a story that resists beginnings and endings in any conventional sense. Rather, it unfolds. It is like it has always been there, waiting for someone’s skilful pen to pull its pieces together. Maggie O’Farrell does just that. 

Indeed, I found myself unsure even where to begin when writing about this novel. In retrospect, my hesitation feels almost entirely appropriate. Land withstands clean openings and conclusions because it is structured less like a narrative and more like the terrain it describes. This is not coyness, but design. O’Farrell’s wager is that form might do more than contain landscape. Instead, it might become it. 

Nominally, the story begins in 1865 on a cold, windswept peninsula in the west of Ireland. A mapmaker, Tomás, and his son Liam are working for the Ordnance Survey, painstakingly charting a country that has been devastated by the Great Hunger. But even here, at this apparent point of origin, nothing feels new. Liam wears a ‘handed-down jacket that has been mended and re-mended’, a detail that later feels emblematic of the novel’s broader logic. The ground beneath them is no blank surface either; father and son stand ‘on a bolt of cloth tweaked aloft by immense and invisible fingertips’. The metaphor is disorientating, but precise. This is land as fabric, holding stories that are waiting to be stitched together. It is O’Farrell’s invisible fingertips that do so. 

If Walter Benjamin proposed a sense of history as something encountered in fragments rather than one continuous line - constellations rather than sequences - Land embodies such a logic. The narrative is non-linear, shifting into different times, places, and perspectives just as the reader begins to settle into one environment. Whilst O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait experiments with temporal fracture, building tension through the careful management of time, its forward pull and ominous sense of what is to come, Land loosens time altogether. The chronology, in fact, begins to resemble a landscape rather than a sequence of events. 

When we meet Tomás in 1865, for example, he is tough, brusque, and has little qualms about letting his ten year old son stand shivering for hours in the rain. But the narrative soon takes us back to his childhood during the Great Hunger, and he starts to seem less unlikable. Cartography, we learn, was his only escape from a Dickensian workhouse existence. Later, he shows an achronological redemptive arc by rescuing one of the workhouse girls, Phina, from a presumably unhappy fate in Australia (she later becomes his children’s mother, though we clock this just slightly too soon for satisfaction). 

Crucially, we cannot help but notice that there are other children at the workhouse. There are other orphans on the boat. The effect is at once one of specificity and breadth. It feels as if O’Farrell has placed a pin in a map and chosen to follow the lives that converge at that point, whilst quietly reminding us that any other pin, in any other place, would yield a different but equally complex story. 

The particular pin that O’Farrell has chosen, however, rests at that cold, westerly peninsula of the novel’s opening. And there is something very neat in the way that we begin here; it feels like a fortunate accident of timing. O’Farrell so organically stems her story from this setting that it would be easy to believe that if she had begun at another spot, perhaps slightly further inland, we might have a completely different narrative. But we are given the peninsula, not only through the lives that cross it, but across time. Here, for example, is a scene which describes it centuries before Tomás and Liam even exist: 

Their feet press down into the thick, blackened leaf-fall. Around them, the golden air is stitched with pollen and the inexplicable flight paths or 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.

Readers familiar with O’Farrell will recognise the distinctly cinematic quality of her prose, her adept ability to render scenes with painterly precision. It is unsurprising that the novel has already attracted interest for adaptation (Hamnet producer Liza Marshall has secured the screen rights) - its imagery and soundscapes alike seem to demand cinematic translation. 

Yet for all its beauty, Land is also, and perhaps most fundamentally, a novel of pain. The above scene describes a young girl, Brith, her Irish wolfhound, and her mother as they walk across the peninsula. But this is no pastoral idyll. Their tribe is luckless, and only a few pages later Brith is savagely sacrificed and buried alongside her beloved dog. Their bones lie underground, intertwined, unknown to the generations of people that come to live on the headland, including, many years later, Tomás and his family. 

Brith, unfortunately, is no exception to harsh realities. O’Farrell is not always kind to her characters, and there is no softening of the truths she depicts. Scenes of suffering arrive with little warning and are rendered with such abruptness that I found myself returning, incredulous, in an effort to confirm their reality. There is, in this, something of a bleak, Hardy-esque determinism (though, unlike Hardy, this feels less philosophical than historical). 

I found myself initially frustrated, too, that Brith’s bones appeared to do little other than subterraneously shift and gradually change colour. Perhaps I expected them to dramatically rise to the surface and somehow afford Brith a form of posthumous justice. But I soon realised that this was the whole point. In a novel that feels less like a self-contained narrative than a section cut from a much greater history, there is something deliberately blunt about its subplots. Events unfold with a painful inevitability, however seismic they may seem, and remain small movements within a much larger historical tide. 

Indeed, O’Farrell has always been attentive to the fragility of bodies and capacity for pain. Where Hamnet compressed grief into the space of a household, however, Land disperses it across distance, spanning from Nordic incursions to English colonization, from the suffering of the famine to Canadian emigration. The result is a different kind of emotional experience. Less concentrated, perhaps, but more diffuse, embedded in the very ground the characters walk upon and extending beyond its central story to other families, other losses, other tragedies. These are not exceptional, the novel tells us, but representative of a wider, deeply felt pattern of human experience. 

At its best, this produces a transient intensity. There is a shocking moment, for example, when Tomás and Phina’s daughter, Enda, walks past her grandfather in a pub in Canada. They have never met, and do not recognise each other, but at a time when emigrating meant losing contact with your family, potentially forever, the moment stings. Fittingly, it is lost in a sentence, and O’Farrell never takes us back; if Land is a novel she is stitching together, this is a very small piece. It feels frustrating but right. 

This same logic that gives the novel its texture, however, also marks its limits. Characters appear vividly, then dissipate. Secondary figures, in particular, can struggle to accumulate weight; they flicker into presence only to be reabsorbed by the landscape that surrounds them. The refusal to privilege individual lives – central to the book’s design – risks flattening them. But, then again, I’m starting to consider that this might actually be the whole point. 

What O’Farrell achieves, then, is not a perfect fusion of form and subject, but a sustained attempt at one. When it works, it is deeply convincing. When it falters, it does so along the same fault lines. Its successes and failures are inseparable. Neatly, this tension is most clearly staged through the act of mapping itself. Tómas seeks to inscribe the truth of his land onto paper, to preserve what might otherwise be forgotten. Yet the novel itself suggests the limits of such efforts. Just as no map can fully capture the complexity of a landscape, no narrative can encompass the totality of human experience. Land, in this sense, is both an act of mapping and a critique of its limits, a recognition that any representation is necessarily partial, selective, and often incomplete. 

As Liam asks near the beginning of the novel, ‘At what point does this story start? Where are its edges, its boundaries?’ It is a question O’Farrell never fully resolves. At a moment when questions of land, ownership, and historical memory have reasserted themselves across debates about border politics and identity, the novel feels quietly, insistently contemporary. In this respect, Land sits alongside recent publications such as Annika Norlin’s The Colony and Richard Powers’ The Overstory, which similarly interrogate how acts of representing land – whether linguistic, narrative, or cartographic – are never neutral, but bound up with questions of power and erasure. What does it mean to inherit a place already written over by other histories? Who has the authority to decide where a place begins and ends? As these novels likewise suggest, there is something quietly coercive in the act of mapping, in the translation of lived terrain into lines and symbols. 

It is perhaps for this reason that the novel’s ending feels so appropriate; it seems more like a stop than a conclusion. Just as it opens in the middle of things, so it finishes with the sense that its stories will continue beyond the final page. There is no gathering of strands into a final shape. Anything more decisive would betray its own logic. And why would O’Farrell impose a boundary when she has spent hundreds of pages dissolving them? Histories continue. The land will keep on collecting memories, bearing witness to lives that are at once fleeting and indelible. The land, after all, endures. 

Art by Cordelia Wilson