‘Having to bury a child must be unlike anything else’
When Maggie O’Farrell was 16, she was invited to a fancy-dress party and knew at once who to be. She put on a black shirt, with a ruffled paper collar, an inky cloak made out of a skirt, her Doc Martens and cheeky shorts over black leggings. To complete her ensemble, she borrowed a skull from her school’s biology lab. She had become obsessed with Hamlet: “He had got under my skin. I felt he was part of my DNA.” And while there is no mystery about Hamlet’s glamorous turbulence appealing to an adolescent, O’Farrell’s feeling was to be rekindled, as an adult, by her discovery of the play’s connection with Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet. There was, she was sure, a novel in it. Over the years, she repeatedly tried to write that novel and almost gave up. Yet it was a story that refused to abandon her.
And now, here it is — Hamnet, the novel of her career. And that is saying something because O’Farrell is the author of eight accomplished and hugely popular books. She won the Costa novel award, in 2010, for The Hand That First Held Mine, and shortlisted for both Instructions for a Heatwave (2013) and This Must Be the Place (2016). Her wildcard memoir, I am, I am, I am: Seventeen Brushes With Death (2017), about living close to the edge, was a bestseller. But Hamnet is a novel apart. And what distinguishes it from O’Farrell’s earlier work is that while it shares the pageturning verve of its predecessors, it pulls off what younger writers (she is now 47) seldom achieve: the power of letting a story appear to tell itself. It reads like a fairytale rooted in heartbreaking reality – there is no magic with which to save a child.Hamnet is believed to have died of the plague, aged 11. His brief and precious life was, O’Farrell thinks, more significant than literary historians suppose. In Shakespeare’s time, Hamlet and Hamnet were, according to the critic Steven Greenblatt in the New York Review of Books, the same name. It is not that Hamnet has never featured on stage or screen: there was Kenneth Branagh’s 2018 film All Is True, written by Ben Elton; a short, one-boy show by Bush Moukarzel; and David Mitchell in The Upstart Crow (also by Elton), mentions Shakespeare’s bereavement. But no one has, until now, imaginatively investigated the connection between Hamnet and Hamlet — what is likely to be a clear link between Shakespeare’s life and his work. Claire Tomalin, Dominic Dromgoole and Kamila Shamsie are among those competing for superlatives to hail the novel, and everyone who has managed to get hold of an advance copy is in love with it.
When we meet her, what is immediately likable about O’Farrell is that she seems unaware of making a dramatic entrance and of her striking appearance. She is wearing a silver Puffa jacket — as though outer space might be her next stop — and has piercingly blue eyes and, a mass of auburn curls and is yanked into the cafe by a small lurcher. “Luna,” she explains, “my sister’s dog.”
We arrive at a doublefronted stone house and she leads the way into the sunny kitchen. The room’s occupants are mainly cats (it is a school day) and there is a sketch of Voldemort in fancy lace-up boots left behind by her daughter on the kitchen table. A wall of glass gives on to the garden and the vibe is bohemian in a good way, with plenty of evidence of a family life: she has three children with her novelist husband, William Sutcliffe – a son of 16 and daughters aged 10 and seven
THE GUARDIAN