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| Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell. Photo: Amazon UK |
A heart-breaking, yet beautiful tale of love, family and unimaginable loss
From the moment I heard about this book I knew it had a top spot on my TBR list and this was all from just the pre-buzz within the publishing industry before the book's official publication date. Once the book was released and the media started to sing it's praises and when Maggie O'Farrell won the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020 award with this novel - I knew I had to pick up a copy right away. I went into this book with high expectations as a big Shakespeare fan and it was intriguing to me as I'd never thought about his life prior to his career in London.
I found it very interesting to speculate what Shakespeare's childhood and home life was like back in Stratford. O'Farrell has a very unique writing style in this book - sweeping descriptions and a very jumpy timeline/viewpoint. It's also slightly maddening that she never refers to Shakespeare's first or last name in the entirety of the novel. She names every other character, but never William.
At first the style in which the prose were written annoyed me and I found it very almost pretentious - I am not a big fan of literary fiction. As I think using big words and having pages of pure description quite dull. However, I soon got into the flow of O'Farrell's writing and found myself enjoying the story (even if I did have to skip a few pages of mindless description here and there).
The story of Hamnet is both beautiful and tragic. It's beautiful due to the deep descriptions of the relationships between the character and the connection between Judith and Hamnet. It's tragic because of Hamnet's untimely death - so young and seemingly healthy to be taken ill and within a few days to have his soul leave the Earth. The origin story of Agnes (Anne Hathaway) was one of the most interesting aspects of the story. So little is known about Agnes and for O'Farrell to write her as a very feminist and strong character (that is draped in witch lore).
The first half of the book is focused on life - the life before Agnes's children and the love story between her and Will. The second half is pure devastation - the death of Hamnet, the void that only seems to grow between Agnes and her husband in London. The loss of a child is something that I hope very few readers can relate to, but O'Farrell does a heart-breaking job of showing the depression and bone-deep sorrow that results.
The ending of Hamnet was what actually brought my star rating from 3 stars to 4 stars. At the end, Agnes finds out the real meaning behind Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. I was in a bit of awe at the symbolism that O'Farrell uses to describe what the play means to Shakespeare.
Rating: 4/5 Stars
Buy Hamnet here.
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