Echoes of Shakespeare’s Hamlet piqued my interest in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, a powerful historical fiction about the son of Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare, who died at age 11 from the plague. Writing about the loss of a child without making a novel too sad to read is the challenge taken on successfully by O’Farrell.
Shakespeare is never mentioned by name as this novel features the mother, Anne, or Agnes, as she is called. There is little in the historical record and past critics have looked on her unfavorably – a woman pregnant at marriage whose husband left her for long periods. O’Farrell updates the portrait and imagines a warm, strong woman secure enough not to demand her husband stay in the stifling environment of a small town and his father’s domination. The love between her and her husband endures despite the hardships of separation and the death of a child.
The story is told in present tense giving immediacy to the death and grief but leavened with beautifully detailed flashbacks of happy times. There is Agnes’s courtship at her father’s farm by the previously bored young Latin tutor which culminates in the rhythmic movement of apples in the storage shed as they are jostled back and forth, back and forth. There is the lovely church wedding, performed by her old friend the falconer priest where her impatient groom smiles happily; her mother, dead for some time but present for this event, gives her a sign of rowan berries; and Agnes, in her yellow gown, wears a crown of daisies, larch and fern made for her by her sister-in-law to be.
Side by side with these scenes full of life is the inexorable advent of catastrophe. The fleas arrive, finishing their long sea journey packed in something beautiful; the son sickens, and his healer mother cannot help him; his father, home for the funeral, cannot bear to stay and returns to the London theater.
Four years later, there is a play about a father and son who communicate across realms, but it is the father who is dead and his son who is still alive. It is the first performance of Hamlet and Agnes is there to see her husband’s portrayal.
Two novels dealing with the loss of a son came my way at the same time this summer. It did not escape my attention that the name of the author of one is the name of the main character of the other.
Monkey by Agnes Bushell is a grand, sweeping, Russian style novel that travels throughout that country in the mid nineteenth century. On an old estate with an overgrown garden there is a poet who has not received a letter from her son Nikolai for a year and is so worried she has taken to her room where she will see no one except a favorite granddaughter and is so frozen she can no longer write.
Family and friends devise plans to search for the missing son. The bowels of Russia, its hovels, brothels, and gypsy encampments are searched, all with an eye towards the secret police who also want him because he too is a writer, and a subversive one at that.
An inkling that this is no ordinary search, and no ordinary young man, creeps into the story. Elena Petrovna Blavatskaya, based on a famous Russian medium and mystic, appears. She and her companion Fyodor Fyodorovich Fyodorov are swept into a carriage that magically materializes. There is a seance where spirits cause mischief, and a fire is summoned. A young woman who possibly married Nikolai (but where? when?) is rescued. And so the search expands – into broader possibilities, time portals, astral planes, and parallel times.
Questions about the nature of being, the flexibility of time, the need for freedom are woven into the journey. The friends have hope that Nikolai will be found, even if it is in another world and another time, and the search continues. But the poet mother accepts that he is gone and at the end of the book writes her last poems. Powerful and beautiful, they convey the deep emotions of loss and grief. This is a novel that defies genre. Is it historical fiction? fantasy? poetry? philosophy? history?
Monkey, like Hamnet, addresses the concept of tragedy as the inspiration for art. It also takes a philosophical approach, reminding the reader of how little we know about life and death, and how grand and encompassing life and the afterlife may be. Agnes Bushell writes from Portland, Maine, and Monkey can be ordered from Littoral Books.
To end with a more upbeat subject, here is a charming article about magpies written by Anthony Ham for the New York Times, March 17, 2022, “Australia’s Clever Birds Did Not Consent to This Science Experiment.”
Wanting to learn about their social behavior, scientists put tiny trackers on these clever mischievous birds, but the birds did not approve. Within minutes, the group of five had figured out how to remove the first device that had taken the scientists six months to devise. True, the birds couldn’t do it alone which was what the scientists had guarded against in their design. But they cooperated. Each magpie took the tracker off another – helping each other in a way almost unheard of in the bird world. Just another example of how little we know about the complexities of life.
Excellent reviews for complicated and challenging books. Congratulations
I was fortunate enough to join Diane and two others when we recently spoke on Zoom with Agnes Bushell about her novel, Monkey. Agnes creates a multi-layered world set in Russia before the serfs were freed, but that resonates amazingly with our experience today. It’s a very moving story of the disappearance of one person, but also about the unknown territory within each of us. I loved this book and hope it reaches a wide audience.
Diane, as always you have caught the essence of two books I have read also. And the magpie bit at the end is marvelous! I can’t wait to tell my bird-loving friends about this one!