A portrait of unspeakable grief wreathed in great beauty
Maggie O’farrell’s Hamnet has already been acclaimed and laden with awards this year but, as Christmas approaches, critics are lining up to hail it as one of the best books of 2020.
It describes the short life and death of the eponymous character, the only son of William Shakespeare, who died aged 11 in 1596, and how the loss may have helped colour Hamlet, arguably his genius father’s most famous play.
The critics lauded the novel when published at the start of the lockdown and the praise has not stopped as they review the year in books. Here are just two:
NEW YORK TIMES
A bold feat of imagination and empathy, this novel gives flesh and feeling to a historical mystery: how the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, in 1596, may have shaped his play Hamlet, written a few years later. O’farrell, an Irish-born novelist, conjures with sensual vividness the world of the playwright’s hometown: the tang of new leather in his cantankerous father’s glove shop; the scent of apples in the storage shed where he first kisses Agnes, the farmer’s daughter and gifted healer who becomes his wife; and, not least, the devastation that befalls her when she cannot save her son from the plague. The novel is a portrait of unspeakable grief wreathed in great beauty.
FINANCIAL TIMES
Five months on, I am haunted by the language, tone, emotion and raw power of Hamnet. It is surely Maggie O’farrell’s greatest novel to date — and in quite a field. An account of the death of Shakespeare’s young son to the plague, it is unfathomably sad, wrenching for its insights into a mother’s grief and more, and utterly of this moment. I can still hear and see the young Hamnet racing through his empty home shortly before he succumbs and you want to weep at the agony of the parents’ different responses to the tragedy.