Although Land is mostly about one Irish family, it is also deeply involved with a piece of land, a peninsula that looks like part of the Dingle Peninsula. (Actually, it looks like the entire Dingle Peninsula, but the area described is too small.) Along with some history, O’Farrell bundles in some folklore.
It’s maybe ten or fifteen years after the last Irish famine. Densely populated areas are now barren, with most of the people dead or emigrated. Liam is 10 years old and feels he is too young to be helping his father Tomás with his surveying. His father is mostly a silent man, so Liam doesn’t know that as a boy, he rescued himself from the workhouse by putting himself forward for the same sort of job.
Liam is cold and tired. They are surveying a peninsula, and when Tomás sends him into a copse, he feels uncomfortable, even afraid, so he comes out and refuses to go back in. Tomás goes in himself and doesn’t emerge. When Liam goes in after him, he finds him altered, excited, talkative, delirious, draped with vegetation. He takes his father to the home of a widow where they’ve been staying, and his father continues to rave excitedly. The next thing Liam knows, Father Joseph is exorcizing his father, a brutal ceremony. It is at this point that the story returns to the far past and the history of the copse and of Tomás.
Tomás is back to being silent by the time the two return to their family in Dublin. He is not really functional, though, but stays in bed. His wife Phina is pregnant, and they have two girls, Enda and Rose. Phina is almost at her wit’s end when Tomás seems to rouse himself. The next thing she knows, he has spent all their money to lease a place near the copse on the peninsula.
There is a lot more to this family’s story, which is often tragic. It is certainly engrossing, and you come to care about most of the family members.
If I may hint at a spoiler, I was certainly shocked and had a hard time buying the departures of both Liam and Enda after a tragic event. It seemed so selfish. I actually had a hard time buying Liam’s determination to be a priest, especially after the treatment of his father.
However, this is a compelling story. Not only is O’Farrell a skillful writer, but she really knows how to draw us in.
