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Thursday 26 November 2020

Hamnet



by Maggie O'Farrel



We had our first group meeting by video conference to respect the Covid related restrictions.





Maggie O'Farrell (born 27th May 1972) is an Irish-British novelist.

Winner of the 2020 Women’s prize for fiction, “HAMNET”, her latest book, is simply magnificent. Her immersive writing makes you live the story through her characters. One member of our group said “Maggie O’Farrel has a way with words.

Of course, everything turns around the death of a child and that fact on its own is very affecting. But there is so much more in this book. The beautiful and poetic description of nature, an essential element in the story, the perfect rendition of the customs and ways of life in the countryside and in London in the 16th century (one of us made a link with Jordaens’s painting of a scene of everyday life at the time) and more than anything the art of making the reader feel what each protagonist feels. In fact, it is all about feelings, the feelings between twins, the bond that links them, the feeling of falling in love and of being in love, the feeling of being different and last but not least the timeless feelings of the mother and the father, so differently expressed, when faced with the heartbreaking tragedy of the loss of a child.

The group agreed on the fact that Agnes, the mother of Hamnet, is the main character of the novel. She is an indomitable free thinker. She is considered as wild, more in her element when in nature where she is able to establish contact with any animal, any plant. She is so sensitive that she can read into people’s hearts. She also is a healer and because of her empathy and her knowledge of plants, she is able to help people in pain. She is different from everybody around her but when faced with the loss of her child, she crystallises the suffering of all mothers. 

“The most famous character in the novel goes unnamed; he is variously “her husband”, “the father”, “the Latin tutor” and this deliberate omission frees the narrative of all the weight of association that his name carries”. As a young man, he was considered as a good for nothing by his family. Again he is different from the other country boys, he is more like a thinker and he knows that he can only find himself if separated from his family circle. Although he really loves his wife a lot ( she is the only one who can read his heart), he has to leave the countryside and his family in order to find his own identity and later on to survive the death of his son.

Maggie O‘ Farrel tells you a story based on fact (one of Shakespeare’s son did die at the age of 11) but still this is fiction. She tells us a very touching story of a man and a woman who although very much in love with each other get separated by the death of their son because each one has to find a way to survive it. The end will see them reunited because both understand that neither of them ever forgot their lost son, reincarnated in the play “Hamlet”.

Everyone thought it was also interesting to learn how a plague virus on a flea boarded a boat in Alexandria and arrived in England on people and merchandise carried on different means of transport. And what is surprising is the fact that the book was written before the actual pandemic began.

The story goes back and forth which made things confusing for some of us but all recognised that the book was simply superbly written.


Paulette Duncan



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