Hamnet

Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press, 2020)

I bought Hamnet having looked at a weather forecast that showed large raindrops for each day of the forthcoming week, and double raindrops on several days.  I needed a really fine novel to carry me through the impending sogginess and O’Farrell’s story of Shakespeare’s family has been on my reading list since its publication just eight days into lockdown.

In fact, the novel kept me company for less than twenty-four hours.

Although I noticed the rain bending and then breaking the last of my dahlias, I was unable to go out and rescue them because I could not put the book down.  I loved O’Farrell’s evocation of the lives of the women around whom the story revolves and, even though I knew that it was coming, the loss of Hamnet made me sob until I was rib-sore and puffy-eyed. This prior knowledge of the darkness in the plot echoes – of course – the cathartic experience of watching Shakespeare’s tragedies.  We enter the theatre knowing that Othello will die, despite his dignity and courage, and that Macbeth’s ambition and sensitivity will prove fatal to him.  Just as I know the fate of Romeo and Juliet, so I began O’Farrell’s novel conscious that Shakespeare lost his son in 1596 yet this knowledge did nothing to soften the intensity of the narrative, and that is a testament to the quality of O’Farrell’s depiction of character and circumstance.  Her writing mirrored my sense of the ferocity of mothering and the immeasurable suffering that comes with the death of a child. 

As Hilary Mantel said in “Can these bones live?”, the fourth of her 2017 Reith Lectures, the job of the novelist is to “… recreate the texture of lived experience” and O’Farrell does that beautifully.  Her descriptions gave me the wooden surfaces, the linens, the earthenware vessels and the herbs that are part of the family’s life.  I could see the dust motes falling in the shaded light of the Tudor home and hear the street sounds beyond its shutters.

That said, the novel’s ending made me pause, frown, and double-back to read it again. I am still thinking about it.  The concluding scene is powerful, climactic and neatly patterned in plot and symbol but something about it struck a slightly discordant note for me.  I think perhaps that it was the brevity of the explanatory paragraph, set just a minute or so before the novel ends.   As ever, I shall allow a little time to pass and then I will go back to this paragraph and ponder it anew.  Perhaps it is the pace of the ending and not its brevity that caused this moment of friction.  

This tiny stumble in my reading does not, however, detract from my huge enjoyment of this remarkable novel and I am so grateful to O’Farrell for articulating the experience of loss and power of creativity with such compassion.  This deeply empathic novel tells a story that we have needed this year more than ever.