2022/121: Hamnet — Maggie O'Farrell

'You are caught by that place, like a hooked fish.’
‘What place? You mean London?'
‘No, the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child.' [p. 240]

A novel about the death (and life) of a boy named Hamnet, and about the life of his mother Agnes, who is married to a man she met when he was tutoring her brothers in Latin. This man is never named: Agnes and her children are at the heart of the novel.

The narrative switches between eleven year old Hamnet's increasingly frantic attempts to find someone to help his twin sister Judith, who has been taken ill, and the story of the courtship and marriage of their parents. Agnes has agency and power in this novel. She's a girl who's grown up at the edge of the forest, rumoured to be a witch, certainly possessed of herblore and perhaps also of some uncanny power that enables her to see into the minds and hearts of others. When the Latin tutor first sees her, he mistakes her for a boy.

Hamnet features a number of Shakespearian tropes -- the tyrannical patriarch (here played by John Shakespeare, Hamnet's grandfather), the twins too easily mistaken for one another, the blurring of gender -- though they're not the focus of the story. It's about the little intricacies of lives, the coincidences and unhappy accidents, the chain of events that leads from a homesick cabin boy and a Venetian glassworker to a child falling ill one hot summer's afternoon in Stratford. Shakespeare apparently never mentions the Black Death, though it must have affected his life. Hamnet's cause of death wasn't recorded (herein, it's bubonic plague) but London theatres were regularly closed due to outbreaks of pestilence. (Unpleasant contemporary relevance.)

O'Farrell's writing is clear, evocative, crammed with detail (a mother counting the menstrual rags in the week's laundry, and knowing which daughter is pregnant) yet never weighed down by it. There are elements that may be supernatural, but they are handled as part and parcel of everyday life. O'Farrell imagines Agnes being shown a playbill for her husband's latest play, and going to London to witness for herself what he has made of the memory of their son: this was the part that seemed most deliberately invented, and it works surprisingly well. Agnes is an extraordinarily vivid and complex character, far from the dull, ageing country wife I've encountered in other fiction about Shakespeare: I found her story engaging and compelling. And there is a very good reason for her husband bequeathing her his second-best bed.

Fulfils the ‘based on a real person’ rubric of the 52 books in 2022 challenge.

Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry. [p.9]