That’s an ‘n’, not an ‘l’. And it’s a novel, not a play. It’s Hamnet, not Hamlet, names which were common and interchangeable among the rural and small town people of late 16th century Warwickshire, in central England. The novel could have been called Agnes, because it is her story, though she is better known as Anne, the country-woman who marries the glove-maker’s son from the nearby town, when she becomes pregnant with their first child, Susanna.
Names, written down and omitted, are essential throughout the book. The glove-maker’s son is never named. Early on he is called a ‘wastrel’ and ‘a gangly youth’, said not to be of age for marriage. He is the Latin tutor, spending his days as a messenger and runner for his violent father, the glove-maker, or giving Latin and English lessons to the children of wealthy farmers and aspiring townspeople. Later he is known as ‘husband’ and ‘father’.
Bartholomew, Agnes’ brother, warns the glove-maker’s son, at the time of Agnes’ betrothal.
Take good care of her, Latin boy, very good care, and no harm will come to you.
Later when Agnes, feral as a farm cat, goes to the forest to bear her child, and a great search rises up to find her, Bartholomew tells the Latin boy that he once asked his sister why she married him. Bartholomew tells the Latin boy that Agnes replied:
That you had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she’d ever met.
What is he scribbling on the curls of paper that litter the newlyweds’ bedroom floor?
Written by Coleraine-born Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet is a stirring domestic epic of home, yard, garden, village, farm and forest. Agnes is the central and driving figure, though the short life of Hamnet, twin brother to Judith, is the pulse of the story.
The language is earthy, precise and beautiful. I was reminded of Harvest by Jim Crace. Matters, places, objects and human interactions are vividly gifted to the reader. The story is charmed. It is redolent with the world – fields, flowers, trees, herbs, plants, animal skins, bread and babies – that infuse Agnes’ sensibilities, wisdom, power and generosity. She is savant and shaman in a thrillingly ordinary world that is set on an elevated plane by Ó’Farrell’s gifts for scene-setting, description and wonder.
Agnes bears a mantle of openness and wildness, inhabiting earth and air. Though never presented as a witch, she does have a familiar. Not a cat, but a kestrel she got from a priest, a part-religious, part-druidic figure.
Readers have differing views on the novel. Some readers find it overwritten and the prose ‘purple’. Though it is a heightened fiction, with otherworldliness enlivening the day-to-day, I liked the truth of it. I liked the drama of it, even though it may disappoint readers looking for a driven plot.
Loud stage aside: Can a thin plot make a good story? What exactly is the relationship between plot and story?
Part 1 ends on Hamnet’s death, with a line of iambic pentameter. A conscious choice by O’Farrell?
Then there is silence, stillness. Nothing more.
Part 2 launches into the grieving, where O’Farrell sometimes uses staccato paragraphs to leap between the emotions of her characters, setting each of them in their attempts to recover from the loss of the child.
Soon after the funeral, the Latin Boy returns to London, using the chillingly contemporary line voiced by many men (and women)
my company needs me.
He is now the playwright history knows as Shakespeare, though never named as such. His company is in the playhouse, where his work enjoys great commercial success. He realises that Agnes will not join him in London. He buys land and property nearer home, including the finest house in the town. His is celebrity money remitted to keep his family at a distance and in conditions that make them the envy of their neighbours and confuse Agnes. She takes refuge in the garden. Susanna, her eldest child, handles home affairs. Judith, the remaining twin, wanders the streets at night searching for her dead brother, but he is not there.
When Agnes is given a playbill for her husband’s latest play, a tragedy based on a medieval Danish legend involving a young man called Amleth, she sees that he has called it Hamlet, a close allusion to their dead son’s name.
The novel returns to flowing prose when Agnes travels to London with her brother Bartholomew, a beacon of (male) constancy and power who always stands by her. There is an early scene where Agnes asks him about the Latin Boy. Bartholomew is driving fence posts into the ground as O’Farrell shows his physical power and his brotherly love in deft actions and dialogue.
Agnes plans to castigate her husband for daring to write about their son without talking to her. Their marriage is under severe pressure due to the loss of the boy, the distance between them and Agnes’ intuition of infidelities by her husband.
The scenes in the city searching for the husband, then finding him on the stage at the playhouse, are exhilarating. Through a ghostly doubling, O’Farrell achieves a splendid reading experience of a theatre experience. Agnes sees that her husband, in writing this play and in playing the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son, thus resurrecting him.
Written in the present tense, the novel inhabits the ‘here and now’, which adds to its strangeness by making historical time current. The opening sentence reads:
A boy is coming down a flight of stairs.
This is Hamnet.
The sexual consummation scene in the apple store begins with
The lines and lines of apples are moving, jolting, rocking on their shelves.
This is Agnes and the Latin boy.
The book is strange, like Agnes herself. And wonderful for it.
Recommended.
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