Book Review: Maggie O’Farrell’s Land Explores Identity, Memory, and Belonging

Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Land is set in Ireland in the 1860s, more than a decade after the Great Hunger devastated the country, leaving behind empty villages, mass graves, and a landscape shaped by loss. The story follows Tomás, an Irish mapmaker employed by British forces, and his young son Liam as they survey a remote peninsula on Ireland’s west coast. During the work, Tomás has a transformative experience at an ancient holy spring that leads him to reject his official role and begin drawing a new map of the area. His version aims to restore the land as local people understand it, using Irish language place names and recognizing the communities, waterways, woods, and cultural landmarks erased by colonial mapping.

Tomás’s decision is both political and personal. He and his wife, Phina, were orphaned by the famine and pushed into workhouses before rebuilding a life in Dublin. Hoping to reclaim a deeper connection to the countryside, Tomás moves his family west. But Phina is uneasy. She worries about the family’s finances after her husband gives up his salary, and she is troubled by the limited future available to their daughters, especially in a village where Catholic schooling is reserved for boys.

The novel begins as a sweeping historical drama that blends family life with Ireland’s long resistance to British rule and the influence of the Catholic Church. O’Farrell introduces a vivid cast and atmosphere: a harsh coastline, a threatening local viscount, a compassionate widow, and a priest who embodies institutional contempt. She also explores the land’s pre-Christian past, evoking ancient forts, druids, and legends that suggest a deep historical memory beneath the colonial present.

As the novel progresses, however, its focus shifts away from Tomás’s cartographic rebellion and toward the coming-of-age stories of his children. Liam joins the Jesuits and travels as a missionary to South India, where he briefly reflects on the connection between imperial power abroad and British rule in Ireland, but his eventual loss of faith is driven more by homesickness than by a meaningful confrontation with colonial injustice. His sister Enda emigrates to Quebec using Liam’s permit and struggles to survive as a domestic worker and street musician. She meets a love interest from Eastern Europe who also laborers in Canada, but the novel only lightly touches on the links between deforestation in Ireland and environmental exploitation elsewhere.

The review praises O’Farrell’s vivid prose and some especially moving sections told from the perspective of Eugene, the family’s nonverbal youngest child. Yet it argues that Land weakens because its characters remain too morally unchallenged and the novel avoids serious complexity about empire, migration, and colonial entanglement. The family is presented as almost entirely good, while the forces of harm remain external. In the end, the book is seen as ambitious but only partially realized: strongest in its atmosphere and early premise, but less convincing in its treatment of the deeper historical and ethical questions it raises.