Hamnet

By Maggie O’Farrell

My thanks to author Joan Heiman for sharing this book review.

This beautiful book confirmed my love for literature that delights in language; language that crafts and creates emotion and mood and longing. This book is an exquisite rendering of a time (1596 and thereabouts), a place (Stratford-on-Avon, England), a family and most prominently its mother, Agnes. Agnes is based on Ann Hathaway, wife of William Shakespeare though his name is not once used in the book; instead, he is deftly referred to as ‘the Latin tutor’ and ‘the husband’. And it is enough. I feel enriched, moved by O’Farrell’s lingering and luxuriating detail, her originality of image that touches on universality.

Five+ years into living with the death of my husband, this book took me into the heart of my grief but did not leave me there. This fictional tale is based on the factual death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son, a death O’Farrell attributes to The Plague of the Elizabethan era. O’Farrell does not tiptoe around or diminish grief.  On the contrary, loss and grief reshape and forever change O’Farrell’s characters. She invites us to consider the possibility that Shakespeare’s inspiration for the play “Hamlet” is fueled by his love and longing for his lost son. This directs me back toward the potentiality of my own creative spark.

Listening to the audiobook, I was equally aware of the skilled performance of its gifted narrator, Ell Potter. She brings a unique life to the written text. Potter’s voice, the English accent, authentically placed me in this novel, and touched my soul. With lucidity and certainty Potter urges the tale through its crises while drawing me into the love and loss of its characters. She affirms my growing appreciation for a return to the ancient art of oral storytelling. Like clear, running water tripping over rounded stones in a swiftly moving brook, Potter’s enunciation, pacing, and pleasure in giving musicality to the written word enhances and enlarges an already graceful and generous work.

In any historical fiction, the author’s job is to bring to life the long-ago and give it relevance in the present moment. O’Farrell does this from her very first pages. Her descriptions of Elizabethan England brought into sharp contrast my loss of daily interchange with the natural world. A walk through my neighborhoods, noticing the seasons play upon my world reminds me of my privilege and comfort, and, sad to say, distance. I am rarely faced with frost-bitten fingers and toes, do not sweat under a burden of baskets of harvested apples, onions, or potatoes. In contrast to the constant work of procuring and preparing food, of cleaning and washing and mending with hands and physical strength I do not possess, I am leisured. O'Farrell lures me into scenes outside my personal experience and stirs a longing for a simpler, deeper connection to the natural world.

On the other hand, love that interrupts, that forces its way past disapproving parents … that -- I understand. And fear of illness, the panic of uncertainty, and the absoluteness of death that comes too soon … that, too, I understand. We are different and the same across centuries, across cultures. This gift of perspective widens my lens, extends my capacity for connection and compassion.

In addition, this book, in its rich evocation of time and place reminds me of the relationship between humans and their locale. Where we walk, travel, eat, and sleep, love, give birth, get ill, and die – these places, where the drama of our lives unfolds, are part of the making of our stories and our souls. The elemental human bond to place is palpable in Hamnet. It has me asking, as I have asked before, does where I reside affect who I am? Am I not quite the same person when I live in a 1970s high-rise versus when I lived in a 1906 bungalow, even when that bungalow sits only blocks away from the high-rise? Does the chair I sit in affect the quality of my meditation? My reading? Does the desk I use influence what and how I write? Do the pots flavor my soup? The powerful sense of place in O’Farrell’s book reunites me to my own place on the planet.

The jewels of language Maggie O’Farrell strings together in this book remind me of how I would love to write, as well as, of what I love to read.  Her description of a street at night in Stratford from the perspective of the owl navigating rooftops and turrets, searching for rodents with nocturnal acuity, stretches me beyond my human vision. When she shifts from the owl to the fox ducking behind sheds to avoid the passage of a night walker, I duck, too, and see the world from yet another vantage point. I find myself reciting William Blake’s famous lines:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand, and Heaven in a Wildflower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.”

I continue to strive to make language felt and tangible, to create the heat or bustle in a kitchen in a few paint-strokes of words, to conjure images that transport the reader into a world redolent with the scent of lavender or newly washed sun-soaked sheets. My writer’s soul longs to participate in the myriad creative possibilities. My reader’s soul is infinitely nurtured by them.