Maggie O'Farrell's 'angry' new novel reveals tragic toll of Ireland's Great Famine

After writing an acclaimed novel about William Shakespeare's family — Hamnet, adapted into an Oscar-winning film — author Maggie O'Farrell looked to her own family history for inspiration for her latest literary work, Land.

Born in Northern Ireland in 1972, O'Farrell was raised in Wales and Scotland and spent summers in Ireland as a child.

According to family legend, one of O'Farrell's forebears was responsible for creating one of the first official maps of Ireland.

"When I was a child, I imagined him as a kind of one-man band," O'Farrell tells ABC Radio National's The Book Show.

"I would look out the window of our car at Dingle or Connemara or Donegal, wherever we happened to be, and I'd think, 'How would one person go about doing that?'

"But obviously, when I was a bit older, I realised that he was very far from alone … the Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland was an enormous project that employed all kinds of people."

The Irish Ordnance Survey began in the 1820s, two decades after the country was incorporated into the United Kingdom.

It was the first large-scale national survey ever completed in the world, and one that firmly embedded the colonisers into the Irish landscape.

O'Farrell turned to the historical archives to learn more about her mysterious ancestor and his role in the scheme.

"My great-great-grandfather worked on the second revisions of the map of Ireland in the late 1840s and 1850s … in the later years of the Great Famine," she says.

The Great Famine, also known as the Great Hunger, was a period of mass starvation between 1845 and 1852, triggered by the decimation of potato crops by blight and exacerbated by the effects of colonisation.

"It was obvious why they needed to make these revisions, because the Famine had completely reconfigured the country," O'Farrell says.

"A million people had died, and more than that had been forced to emigrate, and that's why they needed to revise the maps."

This macabre scenario appealed to her inner novelist.

"I was imagining what must it have been like to be taking on that task, to be making revisions of the map of Ireland, taking into account the disaster that had happened?" she says.

"For me, a lot of novels start with a question. And [for Land] that was … what on Earth must that task have been like to undertake?"

Cracked open

As Land opens, a man named Liam is recalling a long-ago day when he was 10 years old.

In his memory, it's 1865, and he is with his father, Tomás, as they survey a narrow Irish peninsula on "the westernmost scrap of Europe".

As they work in the wind and rain, they come across a "curious fissure … filled with a dense copse" not featured on the existing map, out from which flows a stream.

Tomás, an Irish man who is working for the British Ordnance Survey, goes to investigate. Hidden among the trees he finds a spring, one of Ireland's numerous holy wells.

As he drinks from its pure waters, he is struck by an epiphany. He sees the redcoats' mission to map the country for what it is: a callous land grab.

The effect of this revelation is momentous. Tomás — a taciturn man made brittle by his traumatic childhood, orphaned by the Great Famine and raised in a workhouse — experiences a mental break.

"He's had a very, very difficult life, and there are many things that he's seen that he cannot speak about," O'Farrell says.

"Something happens to crack him open."

By the time he returns home to Dublin, he is a changed man, and the episode has dramatic consequences for his family: his wife, Phina, daughters Enda and Rose, and little Liam.

"He sees himself in a different way," O'Farrell says.

"He thinks that he wants to restore Ireland to the way it used to be before it was colonised, and he wants to draw a map of Ireland … that still exists underneath the veneer of colonialism."

Bringing history to life

Locating the man who inspired Tomás, O'Farrell's great-great grandfather, in the archives was not a straightforward proposition.

"He was hard to find because if you were Irish and you were employed by the British Ordnance Survey, you were not allowed to sign your own work. It had to be signed by a British army officer," O'Farrell says.

"I could see his name in lists of labourers, as they were called, on memorandum and pay slips and things like that. But [in] the actual field books and notebooks and draft maps, it was really hard to tell what was his."

But far from being an impediment, the scant trace her ancestor and his family left on the historical record provided an opportunity for O'Farrell.

"I really enjoyed imagining these people, my forebears, and filling in the gaps," she says.

O'Farrell was more restrained in her approach to evoking the Great Famine, a pivotal period in Irish history.

"It's so important to take something as difficult and tragic as that and to do it justice, to write about it properly," she says.

"A lot of the stories that are in the novel are based on first-person accounts. It was very important to me to get it as right as I possibly could."

In Land, O'Farrell describes the devastation of the famine — the "empty and denuded" countryside, the mass graves, the abandoned villages — and exposes the cruelty of the colonising British, who evicted starving families from their land.

In one chilling scene, Tomás recalls his journey to the workhouse as an orphan. He sees what he first thinks is a haystack in a field but soon realises is "a heap of human bodies … entangled limbs, all bone and joint, and teeth stained green" — from eating grass before they died.

Cassie McCullagh, speaking on ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf, calls Land "an angry book, and rightly so".

"It's about the taking and stealing of land, the taking of language, the destruction of the ancient ways," she says.

"This is a huge undertaking. Taking on Shakespeare and Shakespeare's tragic story of the loss of his son, Hamnet, was a big project. This is even bigger."

The politics of mapping

O'Farrell became so fixated on the art and history of mapping as she was writing Land that her teenaged children declared her a "neek" (a cross between nerd and geek).

"I became completely obsessed," she says.

"I realised that mapping, in a sense, is a really, really strong human instinct. It actually predates our ability to write — we were mapping before we were writing."

O'Farrell points to one of the earliest topographic maps, a rock carving found on a cave wall in the Italian Alps dating from the Iron Age.

"Somebody at that time was inspired to etch into the rock a really meticulous map of the houses and fields and huts," she says.

"It's this really strong sense of 'this is who I am, this is where I am, this is my home'."

In later centuries, mapping came to serve another purpose.

"Fast forward 1,000 years or so, and you get to the Roman Empire," O'Farrell says.

"From that point on, it's impossible to disentangle mapping from colonialism, from a statement of power.

"The Romans arrived in a country, they colonised it, they subjugated the people, they built their roads, they built their towns, and then they drew a map to say, 'This is ours now. It belongs to us'."

Ireland's British rulers undertook the Ordnance Survey for similar reasons: to tax the populace. They soon ran into trouble, however.

"Initially, the British decided they were not going to employ any Irish people at all on the maps, which caused endless problems, because, of course, the language was a huge barrier, and they couldn't ask people, who does this field belong to? Where does the parish boundary end? That was just impossible."

Ireland's toponymy — the names of towns and geographical features — is complex.

"It's a place that has had wave after wave of colonisers and people staking ownership," O'Farrell says.

As a consequence, a single geographical feature might have several names, and the British soon realised they needed to employ local Irish speakers to act as translators for the survey to proceed.

"Men like my great-great-grandfather … would arrive in a township or a barony, and they'd have to set up a headquarters and interview the locals about fields and boundaries and names," O'Farrell says.

These men were valued for other skills, too.

"Mapping is such a complicated discipline. It involves mathematics. It involves algebra. It involves art, cartography, history, linguistics, folklore," O'Farrell says.

"You had to be a Renaissance man to be working on it in those times."

'The permanence of land'

At crucial moments throughout the novel, the narrative returns to the sacred spring Tomás encounters in its early pages.

These springs — known as tobar in Irish — are a familiar presence in Irish folklore.

"They're everywhere in the Irish landscape. It's quite unusual to find a town or a village that doesn't have one, at least, either in the village or on the outskirts," O'Farrell says.

Many of these springs were significant sites of worship in pre-Christian pagan times that were later co-opted by the Church.

"They were renamed holy wells and given a saint's name," O'Farrell says.

"Even now, to this day, people will enact devotions, as they're called. You walk around them seven times, and you can ask for a cure.

"I find it so fascinating. It's such an incredible fusion of ancient pagan belief and Catholic belief."

Situating the story firmly in one geographical place — a narrow windswept peninsula on Ireland's edge — allows O'Farrell to flip through the layers of history that have unfolded there.

"The book, on one level, is a story about a family who are trying to emerge from the long shadow of the Great Hunger," O'Farrell says.

"But also, I decided, perhaps foolishly, to tell the whole story of Ireland via this one peninsula, going right back to the very first people that ever lived upon it."

In the novel's second section, she tells the story of Brith, who lives with her family and her wolfhound in a Bronze Age hillfort near the spring Tomás visits millennia later.

"It was something that I really wanted to do, to examine the permanence of land versus the impermanence of human life and how we are really just a blink in the eye of the vast timescape of a landscape," she says.

Hollywood calling

The publication of Land — O'Farrell's 10th novel — comes at a moment when the author's star is on the rise.

In February, she attended the Academy Awards, where Hamnet was nominated for a slew of awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

While O'Farrell missed out on the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, she says seeing Jessie Buckley win Best Actress for her portrayal of Hamnet's mother, Agnes, was a standout moment.

"She was so brilliant in that role. She is Agnes and Agnes is her and she poured herself heart and soul every single day, every single take into it," she says.

After Hamnet's success, it is likely another O'Farrell novel will make it to the silver screen, with Hamnet producer Liza Marshall securing the rights for Land for her production company, Hera Pictures.

"It's wonderful because I know that this book, which is very close to my heart, is in the best hands possible," she says.

Land is published by Tinder Press.