Satisfaction in Maggie O’Farrell’s ‘THIS MUST BE THE PLACE’
New book provides a non-stop emotional rollercoaster of a ride that encompasses many lives
Irish writer Maggie O’Farrell’s recent novel “This Must Be the Place” was both a surprise to me and a major satisfaction as a reading experience.
It provides a non-stop emotional rollercoaster of a ride that encompasses many lives and kept me coming back for more. What more could one ask of a book? It is O’Farrell’s ninth novel and follows upon her success with “Hamnet,” an historical treatment of Shakespeare’s life which proved very popular with North American readers, especially in book clubs. By contrast, “This Must be the Place” is a contemporary novel with an engaging focus on Ireland and County Donegal.
Broken up into chapters named for individual characters, the narrative moves forward voice by voice; it proceeds chronologically from point of view to point of view; at the same time each section or chapter manages to present a dramatic outlook or situation that adds substantively to the overall story. We get key glimpses of that story in the first chapter (“The Strangest Feeling in My Legs”) when we meet Daniel Sullivan and are plunged into his busy, adversarial, and sensitive mindset.
The method reminded me of William Faulkner’s experimental novel “As I Lay Dying” (1930) where the story of Addie Bundren’s journey to her grave and burial is told by various family members and participants. Here we focus mostly on the adventures of Daniel, a still young but heavy-set American linguist from Brooklyn, New York, and his wife, Claudette Wells, a French woman who, after having successfully stumbled into the international film business in London, Sweden, and California, suddenly chose to walk away from both her fame and the demands of her cinematic career.
The novel takes us in flashbacks through the 10-year marriage of Sullivan and Wells. They live in Wells’ remote Donegal home, very much cut off from the media and modern life. Their back stories and personalities provide the drama for their marriage and help to account for its near failure after a decade of increasing tension. Daniel accidentally “encounters” Claudette in rural Ireland, where he is visiting for the first time on a Sullivan family mission to pick up the ashes of his long-deceased grandfather. Though born an Irish-Catholic in Brooklyn, he has never before travelled to Ireland.
There, while carrying his grandfather’s ashes with him and preparing to fly home, he meets “a woman of ineffable beauty” “in the middle of nowhere.” Those phrases speak to his Brooklyn sense of beauty and place, but they are grounded in his eye for attractive women. When he suddenly meets Claudette through her son Ari (she has been changing a tire on her van out of sight), he discovers the once-famous movie star who, having abruptly abandoned her work and career, has reinvented herself as a single, very independent mother.
Hers has been one of the great vanishing acts in the contemporary film world. Having chosen to make her new life in remote Donegal, she is a single, strongly independent mom. O’Farrell even provides a chapter on Claudette’s cinematic memorabilia; it’s entitled “Auction Catalogue.” Daniel and Claudette’s respective chapters are central to the overall narrative, I need to emphasize here that each chapter has its own vividness, propelling the reader deeper and deeper into aspects of the Sullivan-Wells relationship and marriage.
There are several children involved and each has at least one chapter in which to register and describe their particular perspectives. Since his awful California divorce, Daniel has been allowed to see very little of Niall and Phoebe, the two children of his first marriage; nevertheless, they play important emotional roles in Daniel’s life. So does Ari (the child of Claudette’s relationship with Swedish film director Timou Lindstrom). And then there are Marithe and Calvin, Daniel’s own children with Claudette. Other narrators include Claudette’s brother Lucas, Lucas’s wife Maeve, and a lonely woman named Rosalind who O’Farrell uses to show us Daniel as he recovers from a deep personal despondency that might be called depression.
“This Must be the Place” has an immediacy for the reader that springs from Daniel’s trip back to the United States in 2010. The occasion is his father’s 90th birthday in Brooklyn. Before making the trip, he has to spar with Claudette and then give a lecture at his university in Belfast where he teaches the complexities of linguistic study. Shuffling off to the airport, he knows that he has no lasting interest in or respect for his father and is not looking forward to the birthday party and its family reunions. As well on the trip to Belfast, he hears on the radio the voice of his former girlfriend, Nicola Janks. When he learns that Nicola has passed away, he is plunged into worries about his own youthful actions. “All along I’d thought my life had been one thing, but it now seems it might have been something else entirely.” You might recognize that sort of uncertainty — it often comes with advancing age.
His trip to New York becomes an excuse for a necessary change of plans.
His apparent dalliances deeply disturb Claudette back in Donegal. First, he chooses to fly on to California to see his two children there, and then, after the Brooklyn party, he diverts to England in search of information about Nicola Janks and what happened to her. His own mind comes alive with uncertainties and worries. “To all appearances I am a husband, a father, a teacher, a citizen, but when tilted toward the light I become a deserter, a sham, a killer, a thief. On the surface I am one thing, but underneath I am riddled with holes and caverns, like a limestone landscape.” O’Farrell takes us into those caverns in Daniel Sullivan’s darker side. Overall, her control is evocative and humane.
That darker side makes a fascinating story involving drugs, alcohol, and the freedom of students in London during the besotted 1990s. It turns out that both Daniel and Claudette (in her own cinematic misadventures) were products of that same ‘fast’ time in England. But Daniel’s return to his past leads him into a kind of murky personal depression related to Nicola’s death — a despair that renders him passive and inactive; it is compounded by Claudette’s sharply Calvinistic dismissal of his unhappy struggles.
However, after much hostility and misunderstanding, they do manage to reconnect and resume their partnership, still grounded in Claudette’s Donegal retreat and enriched by the vital spirits of their children. In this regard the novel may be seen as a vindication of marriage as an institution. Daniel and Claudette have numerous flaws but they remain fascinating characters. Despite their differences and misunderstandings, they are able to resume their “place” together and continue to make a home of sorts for their offspring — all, that is, except Pheobe who was shot and killed in a botched California robbery. It is one of the scars Daniel has to deal as he slowly sorts out his life.
“This Must Be the Place” is an absorbing and compelling novel. As O’Farrell’s epigraph from Louis Macneice suggests, the “World is crazier… than we think. Incorrigibly plural.” One reviewer accurately called it “an intricate and emotional jigsaw puzzle whose pieces interlock in immensely satisfying — and startling — ways.”
The novel is a triumph of characterization and emotional patterning, enriched by O’Farrell’s Irish sensibility and her admirable control of narrative structure. She is an immensely gifted writer who embraces modernity but rises above its darknesses and narrowness. Her literary abilities and emotional touch are remarkable. I shall be looking for more of her fiction.