“World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural,”
reads the epigraph to Maggie O’Farrell’s seventh novel — a quote from Louis MacNeice’s poem “Snow”
In “One Writer’s Beginnings,” Eudora Welty writes that “it is our inward journey that leads us through time — forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.”
If you are going to read one book in the coming months I strongly recommend Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel, Hamnet. It spins around the death, at the age of eleven, of William and Agnes Shakespeare’s son (yes, we know her as Anne, but O’Farrell has done her homework, and just as Hamnet
and Hamlet were used interchangeably in the 16th century, so Mrs Shakespeare is recorded under both forenames in parish records.
This beautiful and original story explores the relationship between Hamnet’s death and Shakespeare’s famous play, and how the boy’s death may have resonated through the whole family.
His mother Agnes is at the heart of the novel and she is a wonderful invention, powerful and tender – a wise woman skilled in herbs and healing, with deep intuitions that seems strange and unworldly to us and to her neighbours. She has a lot to teach us about old wisdom and lore. Hamnet’s father (never actually named) spends most of his life in the wings, in London creating his plays, his company of players and his Playhouse. We stay in Stratford (again unnamed but described in convincing detail) with his family; his wife and their children, the firstborn Susanna and the twins Judith and Hamnet, all of them living with Agnes’s in-laws.
I was caught at the first by O’Farrell’s writing. It grabbed me by the sleeve and said ‘Come with me, now!’ and I had to follow. I fell in love with Agnes, and I grieved with her for Hamnet. The whole book is about grief, but that means it is also, inevitably, about love. We only grieve for those we love. Being about love means that it is about hope.
The ending is unexpected, makes perfect sense, and lifted my fallen heart. It also offers a possible and persuasive answer to the question ‘why did Shakespeare name the character at the heart of his most famous play,‘Hamlet?’
A couple of years ago I first watched the film Arrival, a science fiction ‘first contact’ movie directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. That film was also original, intellectually rigorous, convincing, revelatory, and – unlike the majority of science fiction films – ended with a deeply moving punch to the heart. Arrival’s medium, genre, narrative and denouement could not be more different to those of Hamnet – but both introduced me to clever, sage, loving and courageous women, and the emotional poignancy their stories delivered.
If you read one more book this year….
