Yahoo News Not the Booker: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell - a moving portrayal of grief
It takes a brave writer to put words in William Shakespeare’s mouth. In Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell almost gets away with it. Her eighth novel – which has already won this year’s Women’s prize for fiction – is named for Shakespeare’s son, who died aged 11 in 1596 of a mystery illness, though plenty of scholars have suggested that he succumbed to bubonic plague. O’Farrell goes to town on this theory, indulging in a long digressive chapter detailing the origins of the fleas in Alexandria and the series of events that are needed for, as she puts it, “a tragedy to be set in motion halfway across the world”. In this retelling, Hamnet became the inspiration for the play Hamlet, which came around four years later.
Related: Shakespearean sisterhood: Maggie O'Farrell on Hamnet
O’Farrell mainly keeps Shakespeare offstage, and we feel him most as an absence, away in London while most of the action takes place in Stratford. Even when he is on the scene, O’Farrell gives him few lines, preferring to portray his speech indirectly: “Gesturing, clutching his hair, his voice still churning away, throwing out words and words and more words into the greenery.” But for once, Shakespeare isn’t the main draw: his wife Agnes is this novel’s star and treads the boards with style.
In many accounts of Shakespeare’s life, Agnes (more famously called Anne Hathaway) is portrayed as an illiterate stay-at-home whom Shakespeare abandoned for a more interesting life in London. O’Farrell has reclaimed her as someone who has her own brand of intelligence and independent life. She has an extensive knowledge of herbs and horticulture that makes her one of the first resorts of the sick and infirm in Stratford. There are many fine descriptions of this mysterious wisdom and her “witch garden”, where there are “rows of herbs, flowers, plants, stems that wind up supporting twigs” and where “Agnes can be seen, most weeks, moving up and down the rows of these plants, pulling up weeds, laying her hands on the coil of her hives, pruning stems here and there, secreting certain blooms, leaves, pods, petals, seeds in a leather bag at her hip.”
Agnes and her world feel real and bright, most of the time. But you do have to accept a certain amount of mumbo-jumbo about her “foresight” and her ability to tell things about people by holding their hands in a special way. When she does this to her sister-in-law Eliza, we are told it is “the oddest sensation, as if something is being drawn from her, like a splinter in the skin or infection from a wound, at the same time as something else is being poured into her.” Later, Agnes finds out about the death of Eliza’s sister through her magic hand.
It would be just about possible to forgive such nonsense as a reflection on the more superstitious world of the 16th century, if there weren’t also an uncomfortable feeling that this book reflects our own concerns and morality more than the Elizabethans’. Would anyone then care, for instance, about the fate of farm animals and think “of the private cruelty behind something as beautiful and perfect as a glove”? It is not impossible, but it is also not entirely convincing.
What is convincing is O’Farrell’s portrayal of grief and pain. We share Agnes’ terror when she sees buboes on her daughter: “They occupy such a potent place in everyone’s fears that she cannot quite believe she is actually seeing them, that they are not some figment or spectre summoned by her imagination.” We know the worst of all fears when the illness has Hamnet in its grasp: “It has come to them, Agnes thinks, from a long way off, from a place of rot and wet and confinement. It has cut a swingeing path for itself through humans and beasts and insects alike; it feeds on pain and unhappiness and grief. It is insatiable, unstoppable, the worst, blackest kind of evil.”
O’Farrell describes these agonies with such power that Hamnet would resonate at any time. It is easy to understand why it has moved so many people now, in spite of its flaws.
Next time: Hello Friend, We Missed You by Richard Owain Roberts
Shortlist reviews so far:
Akin by Emma Donoghue - daft premise, good writing
Underdogs: Tooth and Nail by Chris Bonnello – admirably unusual
Hashim & Family by Shahnaz Ahsan – an important tale of migration
