SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The earth beneath our feet can contain stories, but how can we hear them? Ireland, 1865, under British rule and upended by the famine in which a million Irish starved and many more left their native land. Tomas is a surveyor, a mapmaker assisted by his young son, Liam. They're hired by British soldiers to map a peninsula in the west of Ireland, and he makes a discovery in a small woodland - a copse. Tomas holds out a pebble to Liam and tries to explain what he's found.
MAGGIE O'FARRELL: (Reading) This is older than any of us, older than humans, older than the soil itself. It was here before us, and it will be here after us. This hole here - do you see? - you can place into it a desire or the name of your greatest enemy or that of the one you love best, and you will know or can guess without me telling you where I found it.
(Reading) Where?
(Reading) The well, of course.
(Reading) The well?
(Reading) The spring, the tubber, in the copse. You saw it too, didn't you? I drank from it deeply, and I believe you did too.
(Reading) I...
(Reading) The well, you saw it. I know you did. The place where - Tomas flaps his hands about his head frenzied, his thoughts seemingly outrunning his words - where everything meets. Where - where - you saw it, didn't you?
(Reading) I saw a stream, and...
(Reading) Yes - his father grips his shoulders in ecstasy - exactly. So you understand. You don't have to say anything now. Just nod.
SIMON: "Land" is the latest novel from Maggie O'Farrell, author of "Hamnet" and "The Marriage Portrait." She joins us now from Edinburgh. Thanks so much for being with us.
O'FARRELL: Thank you for having me. It's lovely to be here.
SIMON: What do those sips of water do to rearrange the world for Tomas?
O'FARRELL: Well, I have always been interested in sacred wells or springs, and there are so many of them in Ireland. And wherever you go, there's at least one in every town or every village. Quite a few of them are connected now with Christianity, with Catholicism. But actually, they go back to pagan, pre-Christian Ireland to a time when druids and Stone Age, Bronze Age people worshiped water spirits. So I find them absolutely fascinating places, and I really wanted one to be in this book 'cause it's Tomas' connection to the very, very earliest people who lived in Ireland.
SIMON: What's it set off in him, though? - that sip.
O'FARRELL: Well, it's hard to talk about without giving too many spoilers. But at the beginning, the first line of the novel is, his father was always a man of few words, and Tomas has lived through things that he finds is literally unspeakable. And the well ends that. It cracks him open, and he becomes the opposite of a man of few words. He becomes a man of many, many words. And his son, Liam, doesn't know what to do with this change in his father.
SIMON: I gather the idea for this story began when a sentence came into your head while you were looking through the window of a train.
O'FARRELL: That's right. So the novel is based on the very few things we know about my great-great-grandfather, who worked for the British Ordnance Survey on the second revision of the maps of Ireland just after the Great Famine. And it always struck me as a very strange and charred task. I can't imagine what it would've been like for him who lived through that huge cataclysm in Ireland and then to be part of the teams who were making sure that all the terrible changes that had wrought by physical and human geography, all those changes were set down in the map. You know, whole villages had been wiped out. He's been in my mind for quite a long time. I've been trying to track him down as much as I possibly could.
It was tricky, though, because if you were Irish and worked for the Ordnance Survey in the mid-century - 19th century Ireland - you weren't allowed to sign your own work. And I could never find a way into it, Scott. I kept coming at it from different angles. And then, like you say, I was on a train once from Belfast to Dublin, I was looking out at the country and just suddenly saw how I could do it, that the key was in this father-son relationship between the mapper and his son, who was his apprentice at the start of the novel but doesn't really want to be a mapper like his father.
SIMON: Yeah. Why does Tomas feel moved to bring his wife, Phina, his daughters, Enda and Rose, and his son, Liam, to an abandoned cottage in an emptied landscape?
O'FARRELL: I was interested in the people who survived and stayed behind. You know, a lot of history focuses - and rightly so - on the million or so people who died, and then also the people who emigrated. I feel as though those stories have been - we know those stories in a sense, and they're terrible, tragic stories and - but I think what interested me was the people who neither died nor left, the ones who stayed in Ireland and survived and how they rebuilt their lives, how they carried on, how they try to come out from this enormous long shadow of the Great Hunger. And in that way, Phina and Tomas are both people who have lived through it and are trying to get their lives back together, are trying to find a way to live in the shadow of this disaster. And Tomas feels after his experience with the sacred spring, with the tubber, he feels that the only way is to live on the land once again.
SIMON: Do great novels like yours drawn from history give readers a chance to see history in a way that our everyday business of living does not?
O'FARRELL: Oh, that's a big question. I mean, all I can say is that when I write a book that's set in the past, I try not to sit down with the awareness that this is a historical - capital H - novel - capital N. I try just to approach it as I would any other story. It's not that I kind of think I want to teach people about what happened in Ireland in the 19th century. Not at all. Novels for me have to be led by the character and what they've been through and the context in which they lived. So I suppose I think of it - I think you have to come at it that way. You know, I think the world changes. You know, the world is unrecognizable to people who lived 150 years ago, but I don't think human hearts and human minds change that much at all.
SIMON: Maggie O'Farrell, I don't get a chance to ask many authors this question. Can you tell us about the outfit you wore to the Oscars?
O'FARRELL: (Laughter) It's not a question I ever thought I would be able to answer, Scott, but I will.
SIMON: "Hamnet" was made into a movie. We don't need to explain.
O'FARRELL: The outfit was a result of lots of consultations with all my friends and my teenage daughters. I chose to wear pink, which I don't normally wear, and I certainly don't wear usually as much pink as I wore for that. But I also decided, as my daughter said, to emo it up. She said, you got to emo it up. I'd had a black belt, and I wore a black Victorian mourning necklace and a mourning veil, which was designed by an Irish designer called Margaret O'Connor. And it was also - I was mourning "Hamnet" the boy 'cause I knew this was the last time I was going to be stepping out for "Hamnet" the film and "Hamnet" the boy. So I decided I wanted to wear something to say, you know, this has happened, and this was amazing. This film was incredible and we're at the Oscar's, but also, this boy died. You know, he was 11, and he died, and he was loved.
SIMON: And I've also read your film awards are unwrapped.
O'FARRELL: (Laughter) Well, I haven't quite got used to them. So amazingly - this is a weird sentence to say - I do have a Golden Globe, and I have a BAFTA, and I have an Irish Film award. But I haven't quite got used to the idea yet. So at the moment, they're still in the boxes in my basement (laughter). But I will unwrap at them at some point. They do come out every now and again 'cause people in the house - particularly, my teens - quite like to play with them. They often do a lot of the award for best cat goes to (laughter)...
SIMON: Aw.
O'FARRELL: ...Standing there holding the Golden Globe, etc. So they're - yeah, they're very fun to have around.
SIMON: That's adorable. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get so involved.
O'FARRELL: (Laughter) No. That's OK. I think so too.
SIMON: Maggie O'Farrell's new novel, "Land." Thank you so much for being with us.
O'FARRELL: It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me on.
(SOUNDBITE OF SVEN WUNDER'S "HANAMI") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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