Judith and Hamnet

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 17^th 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 21^st 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.