MAGGIE O'FARRELL ON ‘HAMNET’
Maggie O’Farrell
The energy in this super-lively interview made it easy to go the next step of an online attendance at a Literary Festival – laptop balanced on the kitchen table cutting up an onion. In fact the buzz between hostess Jo Browning Wroe -introduced in the Festival preamble with the disconcerting line ‘grew up in a Crematorium’ – was a perfect calm base for the ebullient Maggie O’ Farrell.
It was a smooth match. Maggie O’Farrell has scooped the pool lately with a troubling memoir and several prizes but her latest novel, Hamnet is inspired by the short life of a sixteenth century boy – the son of the playwright William Shakespeare. If you feel you really have had quite enough of this period with the Hilary Mantel super sequence of Tudor life ( all right it’s a bit earlier but still what the historians strangely call Early Modern)- think again and give Hamnet a go. I certainly shall after hearing Maggie O’Farreel read just a brief excerpt from what appears to be a deeply feltf piece of historical fiction about the imagined death of a child.
“People often dismiss children who die in history” she asserts ,” As if it they don’t really matter and the loss of a child was somehow easier than today. I don’t believe that for a moment. “
I concur. With the grisly apotheosis of this cavalier approach to the anguish of life in the past reached in the Horrible Histories tradition, the temptation of trivialize personal suffering of our forebears is surely well worth revision. This writer has captured all heart in her version of that greif.
Maggie O’Farrelll realized early on in her novel that a writer needs to know all about her characters’ surroundings. “ I began to write and then questioned, but what was it like in that room? How did the floor feel? The ballustrades? She knew she couldn’t just start her story straightaway without knowing, she had to look behind the scene at detail and she went off to Shakespeare’s house in Stratford on Avon, ‘miraculously preserved’ to ask dozens of question about what it was to be a sixteenth century family living there together. Only then did she begin her task . One little vignette struck charmingly home in a sequence about hunting. ‘ I had written , ‘the hawk landed with a thud on my glove’ or something like that. Only when she went on a hawking trail did she realize that “ the bird is only grams light, when it swoops down onto your arm, you don’t even know it’s arrived..”
Lively, confident engaged and personal, this was a triumphant interaction between two writers. I shall add here Jo Browning Wroe’s debut novel ‘A Terrible Kindness’ has been shortlisted for a prize.
The Cambridge Literrary Festival continues until May 2nd online
