REVIEW: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

In the coming months, it’s likely that you’ll hear a lot about Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel, Hamnet. Shortlisted yesterday for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, it paints a portrait of an English family living in Stratford in 1596: two young twins named Hamnet and Judith, their older sister Susannah and their mother Agnes, an herbalist. They live in the house of their grandparents, glovemaker John and his wife Mary, while their father William is away in London, busy making a name for himself as a playwright. Around them, the world turns and brings with it a season of deadly plague, one which will claim Hamnet’s life before the summer is out.

Maggie O’Farrell

You might have guessed by now that the story of this book belongs to William Shakespeare and his family, although O’Farrell leaves him nameless throughout. It is also, in a way, the imagined history of what is perhaps his most famous play, Hamlet, which he wrote three or four years after his son’s death. ‘Hamlet’, it is worth nothing, is another spelling of ‘Hamnet’, and with the shift of one letter, Maggie O’Farrell has brilliantly imagined how Shakespeare poured all of the grief and nameless longings of his family into a work that, unbeknownst to him, would endure for hundreds of years.

I found Hamnet impossible to binge and so read it in little pieces, a chapter stolen here and there. It’s the kind of book that is so exquisitely beautiful, you savour every word as it comes. Every sentence feels taut and so finely tuned – if you were to pluck one, it might sing. It’s fitting for a novel about the Bard, but the loveliness of the prose is evenly matched by O’Farrell’s incredible grasp of character. Although he is never named, Shakespeare cannot help but come alive on the page as a restless and intelligent man, bruising himself on his ambition and the boundaries set by his violent father. He finds solace, however, in marriage, and it is here that Hamnet takes a bold swing.

In the mythology of Shakespeare, his wife Anne Hathaway lurks in the background, pinned by scholars as either the loveless deadweight shackling him to rural England or the conniving cradle snatcher who ruined his life. With Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell quietly opens a door and allows her to step onto the page as Agnes, a woman without convention. Here she is spirited and strange, a woman with an uncanny knowledge of herblore and the ability to read a person merely by grasping the muscle between thumb and forefinger. Her children are similarly magnetic in their own ways; Susannah is practical and unrelenting while Hamnet and Judith exist in a world all of their own, each twin so attuned to the other that they are practically one soul with two bodies. Binding them all is the fierce love between William and Agnes, one that ebbs and flows but still burns.

O’Farrell takes her time telling her version of their story, alternating between crucial moments in their history – William and Agnes’ first courting, their wedding, the harrowing birth of the twins – and the present moment. The contrast between past and present gives weight to the latter, so that you feel it keenly when Hamnet eventually sickens. O’Farrell renders his last experiences of life with such tenderness that your heart breaks when he slips away. Hamnet contains some of the most beautiful writing about grief I’ve ever read, and some of the bleak emptiness of Hamlet unspools in this novel’s darker moments as the totality of Agnes’ despair settles over the family and William flees to London, trying to give form to his own. Eventually he does, with a play that becomes a shrine to a golden boy and also to the father who could not save him. But it is Agnes in all her fierceness who will haunt you long after the novel comes to a close.

Hamnet is much more than just a revisionist piece of fictional history. It illuminates our greatest playwright in a way that we’ve not yet seen, but it also gives a voice to those that history has cast aside in its eagerness to get to him. Together with its stunning cover art, Hamnet triumphs as a lyrical study of grief and spirit.

—Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (Hachette Australia) is out now.

Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home? Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that one of the children will not survive the week.

Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright. It is a story of the bond between twins, and of a marriage...

Order NowRead More

No comments Share:

About the Contributor

Olivia Fricot

Olivia Fricot (she/her) is Booktopia's Senior Content Producer and editor of the Booktopian blog. She has too many plants and not enough bookshelves, and you can usually find her reading, baking, or talking to said plants. She is pro-Oxford comma.

Follow Olivia: Twitter