Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
I can really recommend the audiobook version of Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, narrated by Daisy Donovan. I haven’t listened to an audiobook for a while, as I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts instead, but as I was struggling to lay my hands on a physical copy of the book, I decided to give it a go.
The novel itself is beautifully written, with rich, evocative descriptions of England’s forests, towns and cities in the late sixteenth century. O’Farrell’s decision to use ‘the Latin tutor’s’ wife as the protagonist hooks into a familiar trope within women’s writing that deliberately uses a female perspective. The book is timeless in its themes of love, family and making your own path in the world.
I imagine that for some readers this novel could cut quite deep, as it deals with the experience of loss, which is written about so thoughtfully and, I suspect, accurately. O’Farrell’s autobiography explores her own and her child’s experiences of serious illness, and she drew on these in her writing of Hamnet.
The film was well done, particularly the last scene of Agnes’s experience watching Hamlet at the playhouse and the collective catharsis of the audience. However, the novel, in my opinion, is much more immersive and deftly weaves an imagined context to Agnes’s life that allows us to glimpse the life of an ‘ordinary’ (although she is anything but) woman during late Tudor times. Agnes is portrayed as a healer, a woman descended from a mother who has the sight, and who is viewed as ‘other’ by some members of their community.
Shakespeare is also seen as being ‘other’, a man whose mind contains ‘multitudes’ that can only be freed when he leaves his hometown and oppressive, abusive father. I particularly enjoyed the resonance of the lists of household tasks that the women endured.
The extraordinary detail of how the plague may have travelled to England, a whistle‑stop tour through ships, cats, rats, trade routes and people’s desire for goods. The children’s rich interior lives were also well drawn, and the relationship of the twins, Hamnet and Judith, was very moving.
One of Maggie O’Farrell’s best novels! Probably my best read of the year and it’s only February.
Format
Audio books
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