Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell Sunday Book Circle - Part I
Hamnet is about William Shakespeare’s son who had died young, how he had died, and how his family had reacted to his death.
I’m not sure what I think of this novel. The prose is good, the historical context and world-building is well done, but it kind of drifts around time and place seemingly to extend the novel. This is another book that needed more blood on the cutting room floor. There were also some very obvious “literary” choices that I was rolling my eyes at. But I’ll talk about what I liked first.
O’Farrell’s prose has a nice dreamlike quality to it that fits this story very well. We don’t actually know what happened with Hamnet. Nor do we have a lot of details on Shakespeare’s life. Creating a sense of unreality fits with those facts. Her poetic prose is the kind of stuff I love for a literary novel. It’s my preference if the novel is going to take itself seriously because dry prose can get boring with these very cerebral novels. Dry prose works better in genre fiction than in the literary because literary novels are typically not plot based. Genre can move a reader through a novel based on plot alone. While literary novels tend to be weak when it comes to plot, so either they need a stronger plot or really amazing prose. O’Farrell does a much better job utilizing sound in her prose than a lot of literary novelists these days which rely too much on theme. So I enjoyed Hamnet a lot more than I did a lot of other literary novels that have come out in recent years.
The prose does a lot of work for the mystical elements of the novel such as Agnes’ mother, Agnes herself, and the connection between Judith and Hamnet. These mystical elements are very enjoyable. They can be a bit too female focused at times. As if women are mystical if only they would pay attention to it. There are no male characters who are mystical and that seems lopsided. The closest we come to one is Hamnet’s connection to Judith, but that is an old mystical idea having more to do with twins than it does with the individuals themselves. The magical quality of a twin is inherent in knowledge of their status as a twin and had their twin died before anyone was aware they existed, no magical quality would exist. Agnes and her mother are both essentially witches, but both were effective enough with treatment of ailments to go unscathed if not mostly shunned by society. Without going into Agnes’ head, the witch quality of the two of them is down to their abilities as an apothecary. Except Agnes knows things. She doesn’t always state what she knows, but she knows way more than is normal. For example, she knows her husband has sex with other women while in London.
I actually don’t know if I believe she does know this for a fact. It mostly seems like a supposition she has. Especially when he is gone for too long. He didn’t exactly admit to it either. Don’t get me wrong, I think given the situation most men would be sleeping around, given the time period too, and it would still be hurtful to Agnes for him to do so, even if it was SOP for most men to do that. A lot of people like to pretend that because adultery was more common for men in the past that there were no hurt feelings, but this isn’t true. Even Catherine of Aragon was upset by Henry VIII’s infidelity. She just knew that saying anything would get her punished. What I’m saying is that the story doesn’t necessarily prove Agnes’ predictions true, so her reaction is almost too much.
The biggest example of her visions failing her is that she didn’t know she was going to have twins. She assumed the two people beside her bed when she died would be her two children, but when she struggles to give birth the second time, she believes she may have been wrong. That instead of her children that it was her mother-in-law and the midwife. So even Agnes admits that her predictions are not absolute or at least not clear. That’s pretty typical of a character that predicts the future. Not everything is clear or what they thought it was turns out to be something different. Writers love the puzzle of tricking the clairvoyant. So this can be a bit of a cliché. At the same time, audiences also expect it. I imagine most audiences, myself included, would be put out by a story that didn’t do this with a clairvoyant character. I don’t believe there is a way to solve this conundrum. Either the use of a clairvoyant character is trite or the audience feels like something has been left unfinished in the story.
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