This roman a clef focuses on Agnes and the death of her son Hamnet who live in Stratford-on-Avon at the end of the 1500s CE.
The story alternates between two narratives. One describes the courtship of Agnes, a country girl who falls in love with her brothers' Latin tutor, persuading him to get her pregnant and then marry her; it continues through the birth of Susannah, followed by the twins Judith and Hamnet; she also deals with her husband's depression by getting him to go to seek his fortune in London. The second story describes the sickness of Judith and Hamnet who get the plague while the husband is away making his fortune in the theatre; it continues as Agnes grieves for Hamnet.
Both narratives are told in the present tense, from the perspectives of Agnes and Hamnet. The style of the prose reminded me of that employed by Hilary Mantel in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy of Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and the Mirror and the Light. This book is written from a close-up psychological distance such that you were inside the coherent thoughts of the narrators and yet they were in the third person. The atmosphere is built up by the accumulation of acutely observed details which gave massive verisimilitude and a rich and deep texture. We were immersed in the everyday life of a late-Elizabethan household.
I thought that the male characters were quite stereotypical. John, the father-in-law, was a drinker and a violent bully. The husband was artistic and therefore impractical, a dreamer (with a heart of gold), who gets depressed and has to go away to work, becoming an absent husband and father. The brother was the rock-solid giant of a farmer with no nonsense about him. The son, Hamnet, was the golden boy, bright, intelligent and lively, the only male whose portrayal wasn't largely negative; this was probably because he never grew up.
Contrast this with Agnes, the ultimate supermum. A creature of the forest, whose own mother is virtually a forest spirit, she is gifted with second sight (the supernatural element is alive and well; this is a hugely romantic novel). A supreme manager, both of people and the house, this flawless wonderwoman also provides herbalist healing (which, it is implied, is more effective than the official male-provided medical service).
My sister, who teaches English, has pointed out to me that it is not only the male characters (and Agnes) who are stereotyped: the step-mother is a classic wicked step-mum. I think this reinforces what I see as a limitation on the book.
Still, stereotyped or not, O'Farrell's layering of detail upon detail means that these characters have a life of their own.
I found the anonymity of the husband a little distracting. I have used the technique myself (in The Kids of God, to be published soon); my intention was to highlight the self-centredness of a character who never names his wife. I suspect O'Farrell feared her central character would be over-shadowed if her husband was named as William Shakespeare ... but we know he is anyway so I'm not sure that it worked.
But it packs an emotional punch at the end. And the prose is magnificent.
Some great moments:
- "The doused, drenched feeling of fury, of impotent humiliation, in the long minutes of a beating." (p 32)
- "She watches the two points of the ladder judder with his every step, then fall still." (p 78)
- "And now there is this - this fit. It is altogether unlike anything she has ever felt before. It makes her think of a hand drawing on a glove, of a lamb slithering wet from a ewe, an axe splitting open a log, a key turning in an oiled lock. How, she wonders, ... can anything fit so well, so exactly, with such a sense of rightness." (p 80)
- "The spine a long indent down the back, a cart-track through snow." (p 157)
- "It is like the embroidery on his father's gloves: only the beautiful shows, only the smallest part, while underneath there is a cross-hatching of labour and skill and frustration and sweat." (p 282)
March 2021; 367 pages
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