By Maggie O’Farrell, 2020
Maggie O’Farrell is a poetic and empathetic writer, and yet
there are a few things that hold me back from fully appreciating this book.
First the good stuff. O’Farrell writes such rich,
descriptive prose that, as a reader, I could sense the scene and the characters
in a very concrete way. When she describes the herbs or the birds or the room,
in a few words she brings an image to mind that places the story in a setting
that simply seems very real. I kept thinking that she must have been there to
catch those details. Although in the credits at the end of the book she lists a
lot of printed references and she describes visiting the sites in Stratford, she
writes with such detail that it’s hard to imagine that she’s not writing from a
lot of close personal experience.
Even with that skill, though, I sometimes felt that a few
words from an editor would have helped. When she makes metaphors, they
sometimes seem overdrawn, like “the dark maw of the ground, ripped open to
accept the white wrapped body in the grave.” Does this have an emotional
resonance for readers? Perhaps, but graves in my mind are very neatly dug and
describing them as ripped open seems to stretch reality for the sake of an
artistic expression. It’s jarring and distracting, not illuminating. Several
times through the book, I found myself thinking that the artful language is
getting in the way of the response that I imagine O’Farrell wanted.
O’Farrell conveys a deep sense of the emotions of her
central character. Agnes’ feelings about her family, her husband, and her situation
are complex, but clear and real. Her relationship with her taciturn brother,
for example, is interesting in how well they understand each other, even with
few words spoken. At the centre of the story is her grief at the death of her
son, and I can understand the depth of her loss and how it overpowers her. It
may seem extreme, but we already know from her relationship with her stepmother
and her birth stories that Agnes is a person of unusual intensity and
connectedness. An extreme reaction seems right in character.
O’Farrell gives a similar emotional sense to several other
characters. Hamnet’s devotion to his twin sister and his sacrifice to save her,
and later Judith’s searching for the spirit of the dead Hamnet seem a natural
part of their character. Their father is one of the least known characters,
initially a young man of little spirit, and later a business man with a close
feeling for his family. Overall, however, we get little sense of his interior
thinking. This is an interesting choice, to deliberately take the attention
away from the most famous historical character and focus on the unknown
background players.
But this empathic acuity leads to another issue for me. In
many respects, these characters seem to be modern people in a 17th
century society. The long picture of Agnes’ grief could be reset with equal impact
in a contemporary family. While Agnes is an expert herbalist, she thinks and
reacts in the way a 21st century person would, essentially individualized
and material. She has no real community connections and no relationship to the
Christian god. Of course, this involves broad generalizations, but could a
post-medieval woman go through all that Agnes experiences without reference to
community or church (beyond a perfunctory funeral and burial)? Ahistorical
characterization often seems to be a problem in writing historical novels,
although I think Hillary Mantel avoids it in her books about Thomas Cromwell. She
is deliberately exploring the development of the modern mind in the same period,
and for me she is more successful in creating a historical character than
O’Farrell is. This leads me to ask, why put a modern character in a 400-year-old
setting and write as if the character’s psyche is not part of that setting?
Although O’Farrell’s occasional over-writing and her ahistorical characters are flaws to me, there are so many things in her writing that I really like that I’d be interested to read more of her writing to see how she handles other circumstances.
