Maggie O’Farrell’s tenth novel, Land, is a sprawling family saga. It traverses the landmarks of 19th-century Irish history, including the Great Famine – with its corollary, incarceration in the workhouse – and the mapping of Ireland via the Ordnance Survey.
The story is inspired by O’Farrell’s discovery that her great-great-grandfather worked on the survey. Carried out between 1824 and 1846, the survey sought to determine the boundaries of townships based on a uniform system, so the British colonisers could more accurately administer land-based tax.
As part of its mission of standardisation, it instituted spelling more palatable to English speakers. The maps it produced entrenched the Anglicisation of place names, which had been occurring since the 12th century.
O’Farrell, who was born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, in 1972, just months after Bloody Sunday, has drawn on her Irish heritage in two of her previous novels: Instructions for a Heatwave (2013) and This Must Be The Place (2016).
Homecoming is a central theme in both. In the former, the O’Riordan family decamps from London to a historic family cottage in Connemara to wrestle with a long-buried family secret. In the latter, a linguist’s return to Donegal to collect his grandfather’s ashes leads to him starting a new family in his ancestral homeland.
In Land, O’Farrell ramps up the theme of homecoming....
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