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- [00:09]
A
This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart. Welcome back. Maggie o' Farrell's new novel, Land, is a New York Times bestseller. The story kicks off with a mysterious event. It's the mid 19th century in Ireland. Tomas and his young son Liam are hard at work creating updated maps of the country for the British. They encounter a mysterious deep well of spring water. Liam is frightened and leaves it alone. But Tomas drinks from the water and is profoundly changed. Suddenly, the previously quiet Tomas won't stop talking. He is convinced that his job is evil and doesn't want to do it anymore. And he's determined to move his family, his pregnant wife Seraphina, his son Liam and his daughters Enda and Rose, from Dublin to the land right by the potentially magic spring. It's a choice that will change the course of the family's lives forever. I started the conversation by asking Maggie o' Farrell what she hoped to achieve with this novel that she hadn't tried before.
- [01:09]
B
Oh, lots of things really. I think it's really important with every book that you write, you set yourself a new hurdle to try and clear. But with this book, I wanted to do two things. I wanted to tell the story of a family who are trying to come out from under the long shadow of Angola. More the Great Hunger, or the Great Famine as it's sometimes known in Ireland. But I also wanted to try and whole history of Ireland just via one peninsula and all the people who've ever lived on it.
- [01:36]
A
The Great Hunger, as you mentioned, is important to this story. Will you explain to people what it was?
- [01:43]
B
Yes. So in the middle of 19th century in Ireland, the crop of the potatoes was affected by a blight. So all those crops were destroyed. And most of the working people of Ireland were relied on potatoes as their sole source of nutrition and absolutely disastrous for those families, particularly in the west of Ireland, because they had nothing to eat. So in one sense it was a natural disaster, but it was also exacerbated and made a lot worse by Ireland's very complicated history and colonization by Britain and the government. And it was an absolute cataclysm. A million people died of nutrition or starvation related disease and a Further million or 2 million were induced to emigrate.
- [02:30]
A
And that plays into your novel, into why Thomas is making these maps.
- [02:36]
B
I was interested in the story, you know, it's very the history about history books about that time in Ireland focus, and rightly so, on the million people who died. And I think the narratives of the people who emigrated could quite a lot. We're now sitting in those narratives are quite familiar to us. You know, we know that story of emigration, we know the story of starting a new country. But what interested me in writing Land is the people who stayed, the people who survived and how they picked themselves up, how they came living. And I just wanted to write a novel about that. Resilience. Resilience seems to me a very particular characteristic of Ireland.
- [03:14]
A
Why do you think that is a characteristic of Ireland?
- [03:17]
B
Possibly because they haven't had a huge amount of choice, unfortunately. I think they had to be resilient. You know, it was a terrible, terrible thing that happened. And one of the things that really inspired me to write the book was about four or five years ago, I read that the population of Ireland has only now reached pre famine levels. So it's taken 170 years just for the population to recover.
- [03:40]
A
Wow, that's mind blowing.
- [03:43]
B
Yeah, isn't it? Yeah.
- [03:44]
A
My guest is Maggie o'. Farrell. We're discussing her new novel, Land. It's about a 19th century Irish mapmaker, his family, and the magical spring that changes their lives forever. It's out now. I read that this was inspired in part by your ancestors.
- [03:59]
B
Yes, that's right. So I think all families have their myths. And when, when we were children, we were told that one of our antecedents had. And when I was a child, I heard it as drew the first ever map of Ireland. Obviously that's not true, but as a child, that was the.
- [04:15]
A
That worked for you as a kid.
- [04:16]
B
That was the narrative that I. That I kind of metabolized. And so when we. I mean, as you can probably tell, I was born in Ireland, but I didn't grow up there. You can tell by voice I grew up mostly in Britain, but we used to go back to Ireland every summer. And I used to imagine this ancestor of mine and I. He was kind of visually, I think based on sort of Sunday night costume dramas. So he was definitely wearing a frock coat, probably some kind of cravat. But also he was holding my school issue 30 centimeter ruler, which obviously to my child mind that was how you measured a whole country. So. So he's always been somebody that's really fascinated me. And when I got a bit older, obviously I realized that all that was total childhood fantasy. So I went to the archives in Dublin. Dublin archives hold the Ordnance Survey map records. And I wanted to try and find him. I wanted to know how, if this was true, the story. And he was quite hard to find because if you were Irish and you worked for the Ordnance Survey, which was a commission by the British government run by the British Army. If you were Irish, you weren't allowed to sign your own work. So all his notes, his field notes, his measurements, his sketches, his draft maps, all were signed not by himself, but by a British army officer. But I did find his signature on some kind of memorandum for labourers, as they were called the Irish. And that was really. It was amazing kind of archival thrill, you know, the idea that I was touching a piece of paper that he had touched. But also, it was incredible because I realized that there was truth in the family myth that he had. He hadn't been working alone, obviously, but he had been working on the second revision to the maps of Ireland.
- [05:49]
A
Do you remember when you had that in your hand? Because you were obviously by yourself. You're, like looking around. You want to tell somebody at that moment.
- [05:56]
B
Yeah. I mean, archives are quite quiet, but there are quite a lot of people around all researching quite abstruse things. So I was able to tell a few people.
- [06:04]
A
That's exciting. The story begins with Tomas and Liam. They're working for the Ordnance Survey, the British organization. What's the purpose of the organization? What's the purpose of them drawing these maps?
- [06:18]
B
Well, the Ordnance Survey is a mapping company, and they were commissioned by the British government originally in 1820, earlier in the century, to make a map of Ireland. It was for taxation purposes. It was for a tax called the cess tax. Even now in Ireland today, people, there's a kind of expression which is bad cess to you, which basically means something much ruder, which I'm not going to say on air, but even now in the vocabulary in Ireland, that tax is a terrible curse even to bring up that name. So originally it was for taxation. And it took them a really long time to make the first map, Partly because they decided they weren't going to employ any Irish people. And also, Ireland is a very. Has a very complicated history with land. You know, lots of people have occupied it, lots of people have broken it up. The plantations originated in Ireland. The sort of plantation system originated there. So it's very complicated. And of course, language is very complicated. The Irish language was banned several times by the British. So place names and who owns what is a very fraught issue. And so my great, great grandfather was working on the second revision, which came straight after the Great Famine, because obviously those early maps were made obsolete during the disaster of the famine, because the human and physical geography of Ireland completely changed during that massive population loss.
- [07:38]
A
What did you learn about the study of cartography in creating this book that you didn't know before?
- [07:44]
B
Well, I just didn't really know anything about before I wrote this book, but I became really, really absorbed in the idea of it. You know, I think I beforehand I just thought cartography was about measuring and it was about drawing and that's what a map was. But now, having finished the book and been thinking about mapping for a really long time, it seems to me this really complicated and beautiful discipline which brings together mathematics, algebra, artistry, history, folklore, linguistics. It's incredibly complicated. And the people who worked on it had to be, I mean, they were men at the time. They had to be Renaissance men. They had to be able to do all those things.
- [08:22]
A
Tomas and his wife are both survivors of the great hunger. How does the memory of death and extreme hunger affect both of them?
- [08:32]
B
I think for me, the novel is a lot about the tension between speech and silence and language and being silenced. The first line of the novel was the first thing that ever came to me. I was on a train to Dublin and I'd been thinking about this novel and circling around it for a really long time. And then the first line came into my head and it was his father was ever a man of few words. And I just realized that, I think I just pictured him and his wife actually as people who hold these terrible things inside them. The terrible things they've been through, the terrible things they've witnessed, but they never let them out. They are completely silenced by them. They smother them with silence. But of course silence doesn't mean that it's not there and that the all four children are aware of these gaps in their parents story and they're aware of that very, very articulate silence. And it affects them, all four of them, in very different ways.
- [09:26]
A
You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest in studio is Maggie o'. Farrell. We're discussing her new novel Land. It's about a 19th century Irish mapmaker, his family, and the magical spring that changes their lives forever. Would you describe the spring to us?
- [09:43]
B
Yes, it is a sacred well. And you find these all over Ireland. I mean, every town, every village will have one either in it or near it. And some of them are really well preserved and very much part of current communities, often by the sides of roads or in fields. Some of them are inside churchyards and some of them are completely neglected and overgrown. And I went on a tour about three or four years ago with my son who's always up for a weird quest and we went looking for. And it was specifically the ones that were forgotten about the interest of me. He did say to me on the first night we'd arrived and I was unpacking my suitcase, he said, why have you brought secateurs on this trip? And I said, because we're going to have to cut a lot of brambles, a lot of nettles to find these wells. But they, they have always fascinated me, ever since I was a really young child, because they go right back to pagan pre Christian island when you know, there were people believed in hydromancy, there were druids, when you know it was worshiping the land. And what you could see and what you could touch was very much the. Their religion in a sense. And these are a link to the island then and now, of course, mostly they're part of Catholicism and Christianity and they have saints, names and people will do very complicated devotions. They will walk around them seven times, they'll say a decade, and they will ask for a cure and sometimes drink from the well, sometimes leave a piece of cloth or an offering to the well in the hope of getting some kind of cure or wish or prayer answered.
- [11:18]
A
That reminds me, it's in New Mexico, is it? St. Gemayo. There's that in the United States as well. Liam. First he approaches this body of water, but he gets really scared. He screams for help. What is it about the spring and the area that it's in that is. That is frightening to him?
- [11:39]
B
Well, to Liam, he senses that there's something at work which he doesn't understand and it's something powerful. And I really wanted to make a link with this novel to Irish mythology and in those myth, in those mythological cycles and those stories which I had read to me as a child, my dad would only ever read them to us. He wouldn't read us anything else. So they are all those kind of battles and giants and a abductions and love affairs and wars are really sort of part of my storytelling bedrock. And I wanted that sense also in those stories. The, the natural world is the supreme power. You know, humans come a very low second really. And you know, you have to really respect the natural world in Irish myth. And if you're ever told in an Irish myth not to cross a river or don't cut a branch from that tree, you really mustn't, because something really bad will happen to you. And I wanted to have to kind of sort of infiltrate as much of that atmosphere of animism, I suppose, and the powerful, the powerful element of nature into this novel. So Liam feels that when he steps into this copse, because it's a scrap of ancient woodland that's never been cut and it dates back to very, very sort of pre human habitation in Ireland, and he does not like it at all.
- [12:57]
A
What role does nature play in your writing? Because it's a key part of Hamnet as well. It's a key part of this novel. There are pages, beautiful pages, written about the natural world.
- [13:07]
B
Yes. I think, you know, land. I always knew the book was going to be called Land. And land is a very potent concept in Ireland. You know, who owns it, who's taken it away, what it means to people in Ireland. It's a very, very strong concept and a very fraught concept as well, historically. And, you know, I also wanted to write a kind of contrast in a sense between the vast timescale of a landscape versus the almost butterfly lives of the humans who live upon it.
- [13:42]
A
There's a difference between land and nature, though.
- [13:45]
B
That's true. I think it probably goes back to the Irish mythology. You know, I wanted to bring in as much as I could of that atmosphere. And the natural world is so powerful in Irish mythology.
- [13:58]
A
What's your relationship to Ireland? Because as you said, you're from Ireland but you grew up in Britain.
- [14:03]
B
Yes, Scotland and then Wales. Yeah, It's a complicated thing. You know, I think when most people ask me where I'm from, I think they're expecting a one word answer, but I always have to give a kind of paragraph. And I think if you. I think if you don't grow up where you were born, or if your accent, as in my case, doesn't match your passport. I think you always do have a sense of dislocation or almost a kind of doppelganger or ghost self who walks along beside you as if you know the person who you might have been if you'd stayed. You know, I often wonder if, you know, what our lives would have been like if we hadn't left Ireland or if we'd stayed. I mean, I'd sound completely different.
- [14:41]
A
For a start, what area stays with you from your trip, from your research trips to Ireland for this book?
- [14:49]
B
Oh, I mean, the peninsula in the book is fictitious. It isn't. It's based on several places, but it is fictitious. I don't name it. And actually the word Ireland and Irish doesn't appear in the novel at all. And the word Britain and British doesn't appear. And it's partly because I wanted to ask readers to imagine a sense of Maplessness. You know, it's so hard for us now when we all have a little GPS in our pockets at all times. We all, you know, when mapping is done by satellite and drone, it's really hard for us to imagine a time when maps did not exist, when we navigated by asking people or by the stars, when we didn't know was over that next hill unless we climbed that hill to look. So I wanted to ask readers. Readers will vaguely know what they are. They know it's on the west coast of Ireland, but they don't really know for sure where they are because I wanted that sense of slightly disorientation that
- [15:38]
A
was Maggie o' Farrell discussing her tenth and latest novel, Land. Next we'll be finishing the hour with novelist Xochil Gonzalez on her release last night in Brooklyn, which is set in 2007. Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The snack wrap plus Caesar sauce equals
- [16:03]
B
extra crispy chicken Caesary greatness. Sounds delicious. Caesar sauce at McDonald's for a limited time.