I was on holiday last week, which means I have had time spend time with my wife and some friends, walk, and read stories. I chose to take Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel Land. In fact, I enjoyed the book so much that I read it twice!
The story, which is something of a homage to O’Farrell’s Irish heritage, is based in 19th Century Ireland. The sometime meandering storyline follows the fortunes of a mapmaker’s family, with all their hopes and dreams, achievements and missteps, and their loves and losses.
The main character is the Mapmaker Tomás who grows up at the time of the “Great Hunger” in mid-19th Century Ireland. The boy Tomás ends up in a workhouse, where he meets his wife to be. Land paints a graphic and gruesome picture of the workhouse, where personal identity is wiped out and human dignity is crushed.
I was fascinated to read about Tomás’s past life before entering the workhouse:
“Tomás would never admit as much to anyone but, even in his right mind, he cannot remember anything about his childhood, his parentage, or where it was he came from. All that information, all those days and years and nights of living under a roof, up until the age of perhaps twelve, all these facts and names that might skewer and pin his identity: gone. All the conversations and meals, the work, the dressing and undressing, perhaps in the company of brothers and sisters, the animals they fed and cared for, the bedding, the cups and plates, the very soil they ploughed and sowed gone from him. The people who reared him, gave birth to him, washed his clothes, tidied his hair for mass, fed him, plucked him off the ground when he fell; not a trace remained.”
As a fatherless man I was moved by this part of the story.
I know what it is to stare into the past and find it littered with unanswerable questions.
Tomás’s wife Seraphina, known as Phina, had been left in the workhouse because her father had gone to America to build a life for his family there. He promised that he would return for her, and he kept his promise, but through a comedy of errors is told by the workhouse that his daughter does not live there. Phina has been renamed and the person here father speaks to does not know about that. Later in the book one of Tomás and Phina’s daughters ends up in Canada where she hears an old Irish man performing at an Inn. The man is her grandfather, but they do not make the connection.
Good storytellers do not insist on always having a happy ending. Maggie O’Farrell certainly comes into that category.
The Bible is full of stories that have broken people and loose ends, yet it is a story that reaches a joyful and triumphant conclusion. Everything that is broken is mended, the heavens and the earth are healed, and every tear is wiped from our eyes. Jesus calls it the Father’s House, where there are many rooms, true love and lasting peace. God’s story is shot through with the tragic, but it ends with joy.
Good preachers learn how to tell the gospel story in a way that sees both dark and light threads woven into the tapestry of life.
Photo by Stephane Gagnon on Unsplash