Book Report: Hamnet

10. Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague (2020) (4/13/23)

It was pure chance that the last book I read, The Great Believers, also opened with a person suddenly finding himself in a house mysteriously absent of people, or that it was organized in alternating chapters going backwards and forwards in time, or that it concerned a plague. Eerie mirrorings. But with those coincidences, the similarities more or less ended—unless you count luscious writing.

This book begins in 1596, in Stratford-on-Avon. The fact that a supporting character is never named makes no difference: his identity as the greatest English poet and playwright is always there, tickling your mind. But the book is only glancingly about him, at least until the very end; it is much more about his wife, Agnes (pronounced something like Ahniss), and always, too, about their son, Hamnet, who succumbed to bubonic plague at age eleven. 

The alternating chapters tell about the "now" of Hamnet, and his last few days caring for his twin sister, Judith, who has taken sick, and then falling sick himself; and the backstory of his parents meeting, falling in love, setting up a household adjacent to the man's father's glovery, raising a family. Agnes is touched with a gift, to be able to sense people's fates. Her husband, meanwhile, is trying to get out from under the cruel shadow of his father. Until eventually Agnes sends him off to London to represent the family business. Only, of course, he finds a different line of work, and a life of his own.

And then Hamnet dies. And we arrive at part II, which is about mourning his loss, about continuing on living, somehow. Which involves, on Agnes's part, and ever so slowly, finding her way back into life, into her medicinal plants and curative powers, and on her husband's, writing a play about their dead son—who in the play is not yet dead, but is haunted by death. 

Oh, but wait, there's another eerie mirroring: in my report on The Great Believers, didn't I end with a character talking about Hamlet, and Horatio's "burden of memory"?

I didn't flag any passages as standing out, though the book is beautifully written. It just flows. If I page through tomorrow and find something that is worth sharing, I will do so. But for now: that's my report.