Hamnet author Maggie O’Farrell on maps as rebellion

I knew Maggie O’Farrell would make me cry.

After all, Land, the new book from the mistress of melancholy behind Hamnet, is set in the wake of the Irish Famine.

I was not surprised, then, when reading Land, that I teared up over the deaths, the heart-rending depictions of workhouses, or her mercilessly crafted twists of fate.

What did shock me was how melancholy her love for maps made me feel. As much as the novel is a paean to the land of Ireland and its inhabitants, it’s also an ode to the wonder of maps, a wonder so many of us have let fade in the digital era.

For O’Farrell, mapmaking is a “peculiar mix of science and storytelling, mathematics and artistry.” It’s at the center of her new novel, which tells the story of an unnamed peninsula of Ireland across thousands of years, through the humans who called it home, in the family of a mapmaker working for the Ordnance Survey of Ireland— once the world’s largest mapmaking endeavor. It lasted from 1825 to 1846 yet needed revisions just six years later. By 1852 a million people had died and nearly two million more had left during the Great Famine, triggered by a mold that wiped out large swaths of the country’s potato crop. Originally launched by the British for taxation purposes, the Ordnance Survey instead became a devastating record of pre- and post-famine Ireland.

On a recent morning in New York City, O’Farrell joined me to talk about her own family’s history with the Ordnance Survey, Irish myth, and our mutual love of all things cartographic.

O’Farrell’s “Ghost Self”

Pale, with startling blue eyes and ringlets of red hair, you look at Maggie O’Farrell and think—yes, that’s somebody who can tell a tale about Ireland.

But when she speaks I keep hearing an accent that isn’t Irish.

Though born in Northern Ireland, and returning often to see family, she mostly grew up in Scotland. I sense a tinge of wistfulness when we discuss this.

“If people ask me where I'm from, I think they generally expect a one-word answer, but I usually have to give a kind of paragraph,” she begins. “If you don't grow up where you were born, or if your accent doesn't match your passport, as in my case, then I feel as though there's a kind of ghost self or a doppelganger that exists beside me as to who I might have been if we'd stayed.”

That is perhaps reflected in the seriousness with which she took the responsibility of writing about the Great Famine.

“I was really apprehensive writing about An Gorta Mór, The Great Hunger ... it was very important to me, the few scenes that are set during those terrible years, that they are as close to first-person accounts as I could get,” she says. “Some things resist fictionalization in a sense, and yes, it's in the novel, certainly, but anyway, I didn't have to make it up.”

I have a question that bubbles up every time I read something that hews close to the brutality of human life as in Hamnet and Land: do authors consider their reader’s pain tolerance?

O’Farrell doesn’t really bite at first.

“I don’t know,” she almost-but-not-quite-tersely replies. “I mean, it's not something I think about too much. I try to stay true to the story and true to the time and true to whatever I can find.”

She pauses.

“When I was writing Hamnet, always at the forefront of my mind was the terrible statistic that you had a one in five chance of making your fifth birthday as a child,” she starts. “I think if you’re going to choose to write about families in Elizabethan England, then you have to face up to that.” When William Shakespeare was born, O'Farrell points out, his mother had already lost two children before the plague hit.

"I just kept thinking, what must that summer have been like for his mother? Two doors down on Henley Street, that whole family died of the plague. And there she was with her tiny six-week-old baby, knowing that the plague was going on."

“I didn't have to think, ‘What's a reader's tolerance to pain,’ it was more, ‘How can I convey the reality of this?”’

Mythical inspirations

While O’Farrell’s family might have left for Scotland, her “father was one of those immigrants who never got over leaving,” she tells me. When it came time for bedtime, despite her and her siblings pleading for Pippi Longstocking and the like, he would only read Irish myths.

“He’d say, ‘these are the only stories you'll ever need to know.’”

This “mythological thinking” or even what she calls “mythological realism” infuses her books.

The myths also have Ireland’s history in them. As part of her research, she took her son to Ireland and dragged him around to look at holy wells that were once revered in pagan Ireland and often co-opted by Christianity.

“You can actually just turn up in any village or town in Ireland,” she informs me. “If there's a bookshop, you can ask the bookseller, because they know everything, or you can ask in the pub, or you just find someone who's about 70 and say, ‘Where's the holy well?’”

Sometimes they’re abandoned, but often they’re maintained and people will drop something in and ask for a cure or some still do the devotions (walking around saying the rosary)—a fascinating blurring of Ireland’s Druid and Christian history.

But these wells are perhaps the best example of the truth hidden in Ireland’s myths. Different wells were supposed to have different properties—some grant wishes, some offer cures, and so on. One, Tobar na nGealt (“the well of the mad”) was said to cure madness. (Tests carried out in 2012 discovered the spring had naturally-occurring high levels of lithium.)

Whether it’s a fish that speaks or a land that has its own point of view—those elements of Land’s tale go back, she says, to those Irish myths.

A fated love of maps

Both her parents studied geography and there are multiple geographers and cartographers in her family. Her great-great-grandfather worked for the Ordnance Survey.

“I do think that kind of DNA has passed down, filtered down through us all,” O’Farrell admits.

While she found it difficult to track down his work for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland (the Irish were “laborers” and not allowed to sign their work) she did manage to do so in Scotland where her ancestor was sent to help.

She put in a request at the National Library of Scotland and, she says, “a few minutes later they came up with this thing like a tea trolley and on it was stacked about 15 or 20 field books and draught maps, all of which were his!”

“Buried treasure,” is how O’Farrell describes it. She ends up putting one of his beautifully crafted phrases in her novel.

“He's describing a castle on the west coast of Scotland and he said, ‘it is much injured by time and the hand of man’ and I thought that's a beautiful sentence, isn't it?”

What’s in a name?

I fire off some final questions given to me by our maps team, including: “What stories do you hope readers notice in the places around them that they might otherwise overlook?”

O’Farrell takes a beat, and then has one—toponymy, the study of place names.

“I feel it's very high-handed of a novelist to say, ‘This is what I want readers to depart with,’” she caveats, “but I do hope that people will lift up their eyes and look at street signs or look at town’s names and think.”

She rifles off a list of examples in her own research. Tubber, which means holy well, can be found in many place names, such as Tubber, County Clare (“Tubber” means well). Or the Iron Age prefix “rath”, meaning ring or hill fort and still seen in towns like Rathkeale and Rathcoole all over Ireland. “And I just love the idea,” she says as we hunt for our waiter and the check, “that you can be walking in a modern town in Ireland, maybe buying your groceries and you suddenly think, ‘Actually, there must have been hill fort here once.’”

Why looking at maps is rebellious

One of the reasons I was so excited to meet O'Farrell is my own obsession with maps. Now at National Geographic, I have a better sense of how hard they are to make. But as a kid, I had no concept of the work that went into them. Not when I pulled our monstrous world atlases out of their special case to gaze at for hours, dreaming of far-off adventures, and hoping I didn’t damage the books in a way my mother could see. Certainly not when I ripped the paper maps out of my sister’s hand in the backseat on our yearly drives to Vermont. I admit to O’Farrell that technology has taken some of that wonder from me.

“Maps were always just so fun,” O’Farrell says, nodding in agreement. “You don't get that on a satellite Google map.”

She looks at me, almost reproachfully. “You can resist, you can get those [paper] maps and you can still look at them, you can resist the creep,” she says.

“I think reaching for a paper map these days is an act of, I don't know, rebellion. It should be encouraged.”