THE Irish seem to have a closer relationship with the mystical, the spiritual … the “other side” than many nations. All the Celtic peoples have their mystical side but the Irish have held on to their mythology more, perhaps because the Romans never conquered them.
Maggie O’Farrell was born in Coleraine, in Co Londonderry, and now lives in Edinburgh. She has no trace of either Irish or Scottish accent, but you sense a Celtic soul, drawn to landscapes full of ancient remains and even more ancient memories. Even in Hamnet, a novel in which all the action takes place in England – in Stratford-on-Avon and London – there is a profound sense of place and of a mystical connection between the central character, Agnes, and the forest and fields where she finds her herbal remedies … and peace.
That sense of place and its mythical and mystical past are very much at the heart of her new novel, Land, published at the beginning of June, and the subject of her appearance at the final event of this year’s Bath Literature Festival. In conversation with fellow novelist Bobby Palmer, the red-headed author – she looks like a Celtic princess, albeit in 21st century clothes – talked about the new book and about the writing process.
She is not a writer who describes her craft as suffering, although she obviously takes it very seriously and spends months on research, thought and writing. She does not make plans, does not immediately have a title in mind, and sometimes struggles to find the actual beginning.
The first line of the new novel came to her on a train journey from Belfast to Dublin: “His father was ever a man of few words.” She could suddenly see the story and wrote 12 pages of notes for it.
The genesis of Land was a family myth. “All families have their myths,” she says. “We were always told that one of our ancestors drew the first map of Ireland.” That may have been an exaggeration, but the story is true – her great-great-grandfather worked for the Ordnance Survey, the English military organisation that mapped the whole of Ireland.
“He has fascinated me since childhood,” she says, adding: “All myths have an element of truth.” And through her central character Tomas, she tells some of his story – and her family’s story.
Finding out her ancestor’s story, particularly what maps he worked on, proved very difficult as the Irish “labourers” who worked with the English Redcoat officers were not allowed to sign their work. She eventually found his signature in ledgers in the national archives in Dublin and later found signed work in archives in Scotland, where he also worked. “It was an astonishing feeling, finding his name,” she says.
Land is set in the 1860s, on an imaginary peninsula on the west coast of Ireland. The time is more than a decade after the Great Famine, which led to the deaths of an estimated one million people from starvation and related diseases, while one to two million more left, emigrating, some voluntarily and others after being evicted, most settling in Canada or the USA.
The novel is the story of one family but also of the island of Ireland. After the devastation of the famine, whole villages were wiped out, big estates lost many of their tenants and farm workers – the landscape changed, and the OS mappers set out to depict the “new” topography. “What must that work have been like,” she wonders – particularly for the Irish people, like Tomas and his family, who had survived.
There is a second ghostly element to the novel, in the character of Brith, a girl in neolithic times who is destined to be sacrificed. Maggie is deeply interested in the ancient history of Ireland, its sacred wells, its prehistoric sites: “I am always fascinated how the land has a character.”
Maggie had to learn a lot about cartography and she began to understand what “an astonishing undertaking” that map-making was. She learned that the earliest surviving map is carved in stone on the wall of a cave in the Italian Alps: “It is an interesting human instinct to map.” She also learned to play the fiddle – one of Tomas’s children is a musician – but her children ask her not to!
Another key character in Land is Liam, Tomas’s son and Maggie’s great grandfather. He helps his father with the mapping, later becomes a Jesuit and later still leaves the Church. It is a very Irish story.
Replying to a question about the challenge of writing very emotional or tragic scenes, Maggie said it was “very hard” to write scenes such as Hamnet’s death or Agnes laying out his body.
She describes part of her process as “tiptoeing along the edge of the mythical.” And she rejects the idea of writing as suffering: “I always wanted to be a writer,” she says. “It is an opportunity to live lots of different lives at the same time.”
FAC