In the distance, Tom\u00e1s glimpses a thicket of trees, not knowing that it is a sacred place whose origins reach back to the \u201cbeginning of time\u201d. The mysterious woodland is not recorded on any existing map and when Tom\u00e1s enters the copse to investigate he vanishes only to reappear the following morning, dishevelled but otherwise unharmed.<\/p>\n
He does emerge changed, however. The certainty of the surveyor\u2019s world \u2013 with its theodolites (a precision instrument used for measuring angles horizontally and vertically), gunter\u2019s chains (a distance-measuring device) and Euclidean faith in point, line, measure, and angle \u2013 imploded in the copse. He sees now that mapping is \u201cact of colonisation\u201d, a way of making space legible so that it can be appropriated as property. <\/p>\n
The simplified landscape of the usurper \u2013 a landscape of estates, courthouses, cathedrals and market squares \u2013 yields easily to the neat authority of line and symbol. But what of the rich, sensuous world preserved within the people\u2019s oral traditions? What of the world in which rivers are alive, animals speak, gods and mortals mingle, and death is less an end than a transformation into another form of being? What of the mystical, awe-inspiring and spiritual, and the wisdom kept alive in the lore of the seancha\u00ed<\/em> (the traditional Irish storyteller)?<\/p>\n As a scholar of Ireland\u2019s Great Famine<\/a>, An Gorta M\u00f3r<\/em>, I am aware of how devastating the 1840s were. One million lives were lost to starvation and disease and two million people<\/a> emigrated in the immediate aftermath.<\/p>\n In a five-year period, between 1845 and 1851, the number of plots under or equal to 1 acre declined by almost 75% and farms between 15 and 30 acres increase by nearly 80%. By the end of the century, the acreage under potatoes and grain had halved as a tillage farming made way for an export-oriented pastoral economy. In 1800, half of Ireland\u2019s population talked in the Irish language. By the end of the 19th century that figure was reduced to 14%. Emigration was the new normal, part and parcel of life-cycle of rural life in Ireland. <\/p>\n This is the context for O\u2019Farrell\u2019s novel: the land was changed utterly. A whole way of life was eroded, and Land imagines what it must have been like to walk among the ruins, to see a agrarian culture collapse, and, for those left behind, to forge a future from remnants. <\/p>\n Tom\u00e1s vows that he will \u201cnever again cede to [the coloniser\u2019s] version of geography, of history, of linguistic and toponym\u201d. With his family\u2019s savings, he purchases a plot of ground next to the copse and moves his family there. He is determined to make a different map of the land, one that will capture not only its physical features \u2013 \u201cdolmen, stone cist, tumulus, evicted village, pre-colonial kingdom, and navel\u201d \u2013but the shifting webs of meaning attached to place.<\/p>\n \u201c[It\u2019s] not impossible,\u201d our narrator at one point informs us, \u201cthat there are remnants of others here in this place, stray elements or traces of the people who walked this land before.\u201d Ultimately, Land suggests that place is neither neutral nor empty, but always layered with what has been lived, lost and half-forgotten. <\/p>\n The novel resists any neat separation between past and present, \u201cmyth\u201d and \u201cfact\u201d, showing instead how meaning endures in material and uncanny forms. Meaning can be found in stone and soil, in buried objects, and in memories that resist erasure. In O\u2019Farrell\u2019s hands, the land is both witness and participant, holding within it the imprint of human experience and the unsettling knowledge that nothing really goes away.<\/p>\n This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.<\/em><\/p>\n David Nally does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Maggie O\u2019Farrell\u2019s exquisite new novel, Land, is a haunting tale of loss, endurance and renewal. Spanning generations and continents, O\u2019Farrell traces the fragile threads that connect people and place: stories half remembered, names erased, objects carried forward like talismans against oblivion, ghosts that haunt the edges of memory, music that conjures grazed fields and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/counter.theconversation.com\/content\/284171\/count.gif\")
<\/p>\n