Land Review

I want to tell you how i felt reading the first twenty pages of this book because i think it is the quickest way to explain what o'farrell is doing and why it works so well. It is ireland in the 1830s and a man called tomas is working as a surveyor helping british soldiers map land that local people have been living on for generations. His son liam is with him and the two of them are doing this careful technical work together and o'farrell writes the relationship between them in a way that tells you everything about who they are without a single line of explanation. The father is quiet and precise. The son is watchful and trying to understand. The land around them is wet and cold and particular and real. And then something happens in a wood and nothing after that is the same.

I am being deliberately vague about what happens because it is one of those things that lands differently if you do not know it is coming. What i can say is that it sets the whole book in motion and the rest of land is about what flows from that moment forward through years and generations. O'farrell moves through time in this novel in a way that reminded me a little of how she handled the structure of hamnet but feels more confident here. She will be in a scene and then suddenly she is twenty years forward and then she pulls back and you are in a different generation entirely and none of it feels disorienting because she has built the sense of place so strongly that you always know where you are even when you are not sure exactly when.

The land itself is the thing that holds it all together. There is a specific piece of ground in this book, a few acres of irish soil, that keeps coming back through the generations and o'farrell traces what happens to it and who has it and who loses it and what it costs people to be separated from it. This is not an abstract political point about colonisation although the politics are absolutely present. It is something more personal than that. She is writing about the specific grief of losing a place you belong to and the way that grief does not end with the generation that experienced it. It gets handed down. It shapes the people who come after even when they do not fully understand where the shape came from.

The writing about the setting of the west of ireland is some of the best prose o'farrell has produced. I said this in the what i liked section and i want to say it again here because i think it is the central achievement of the book. She is not describing setting for atmosphere. She is writing about it as a living thing with its own history and its own claims on the people who live there and the people who want to take it away. There are passages here that made me stop reading and go back to the beginning of the paragraph and read them again not because i had missed something but because i wanted to be inside them for longer. That is a rare experience with any book.

The structure moves through generations and i want to be honest that not every generation gets the same depth. There are sections where o'farrell is moving faster than i wanted her to and i felt the compression in a way that occasionally broke the spell a little. This is a problem the book has because it is ambitious not because it has failed.

Liam is my favourite thing in the book and i want to stay on him for a moment because i think o'farrell does something very difficult with him.