Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

 

372 pages

Publisher: Tinder Press

Book Club Read

 

Blurb

On a summer’s day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?

Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. 

Neither parent knows that one of the children will not survive the week.

Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright. It is a story of the bond between twins, and of a marriage pushed to the brink by grief.

It is also the story of a kestrel and its mistress; a flea that boards a ship in Alexandria; and a glovemaker’s son who flouts convention in pursuit of the woman he loves. Above all, it is the tender reimagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.

 

Review

I’m not entirely sure what to say about this book.

The story is well written and flows with an ease I envy, which means it was a mostly effortless read for me.

I also found Hamnet a very easy book to walk away from. While reading was easy for as long as I had the book open, it was even easier to ignore the story, forget about it even, when I wasn’t reading. Given Maggie O’Farrell received the Women’s Prize for Fiction for this work in 2020 and taking into account the glowing blurbs from other authors, I’m inclined to blame myself for not being gripped by the story.

Maggie O’Farrell is very generous with her words as a writer. Everything gets a full description. Very little is ever hinted at. While some of the descriptions and clarifications were glorious both for the language used to share them and for the emotions they evoked, there were at least as many occasions when I thought a few simple words might have painted a similar, if not vastly improved, image.

I love the idea of taking the combination of Shakespeare’s deceased son and the play that shares his name and tying the two together. But the story didn’t touch me. I would have expected an emotional reaction to Hamnet’s dying and to the subsequent grief his surviving family members deal with, all in their individual ways.

It didn’t.

For me, those emotions got lost in the descriptions which I’m sure were meant to amplify the pain and suffering. I took it all as fact without feeling a connection. I just didn’t care about Agnes, Will, Suzanna, or Judith. In fact, the character that was most alive for me, was Hamnet, although his death means he has less of a presence in this book than any of the others. And even that connection with Hamnet didn’t mean I was touched when he died.

Of course, it is quite possible that the set-up of the boy’s death, making it his choice, has a lot to do with that disconnect. While I had no problem with Agnes’s mystical powers, making Hamnet choose to take his sister’s place was one step too far for me in the unbelievable stakes.

While the book may be titled Hamnet, the Shakespeare title that came to mind most while reading this story was ‘Much ado about nothing’. Not that I would ever describe the death of a child as such, but the surplus of words, and the resulting loss of direct harshness, made the reading experience rather bland for me.