Book Review: “Hamnet” by Maggie O’Farrell

Maggie O’Farrell’s latest effort in literature is devised of two things: firstly there is a historical drama afoot and it is set upon the dainty Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1596, then there is an influence from the Bard of Avon’s most famous tragedy, “Hamlet”. I’m not sure I entirely got the gist of how the play really drove influence into the text apart from at the end, but it was well thought out and often had some strange features that I would like to partake in with you here. The text’s first chapter is a tell-tale sign of what is to come. First off, we have the relationship between Hamnet and his sister Judith, who is incredibly sick and the parents are not around to help out. Hamnet does everything he can to look for some help for his sick sister but finds nothing but hurt and pain. One thing I did enjoy about the book is the way silence is depicted. The way in which when nobody is speaking or doing anything, there is a certain amount of space there that is just hanging in the air. It is a brilliant feature of the text and gains it a mark for creativity.

However, the book is entirely written in present tense and I’m not sure whether I liked that or not. I’ve not really read anything like it since “Bright Lights, Big City” by Jay McInerey. It is a little bit odd to read since the book is set so far in the past. At times the writing can seem a bit distant and jittered - with passages becoming ill-written and disjointed and then, it can also seem a bit emotionless. For example: when Hamnet gets a cut on his forehead and flushes white but says nothing about it when Agnes comes back to ask him about it. I felt like that scene would’ve been better written had the book been penned in past tense. I feel like I personally did not really enjoy the present tense feel because of the fact I saw it disrupted the flow of the book from time to time and often rendered it pretty distant when the reader approaches the text.

I enjoyed the Shakespearean influence in the latter half of the book because of the way it wove its way into the writing and prepared the reader for the finale. It was well executed and well written. Sometimes in the first half of the book, the influence can seem almost as if it were not there, but the second half makes up for it very well. Be that as it may, again, the present tense style seems to ruin it for me a little bit - it is like the book reads as a badly written set of stage directions.

The lengths of the chapters were very well done to reflect various changes. Some chapters reflecting changes in character presence were a length of a few pages. Some that reflected changes in place or time or conversation ranged from a couple of pages to being quite long and honestly, I felt like this was a prime feature for readability. It shows that the author has thought about the way in which the reader will understand and comprehend the different situations in their book.

In conclusion, I felt like this book lacked a deep emotion that normally, I am used to in literature. Honestly, I love flowery and over the top language, so this was not really for me. I didn’t feel like I could get immersed into it, but I appreciate that the concept was well thought out if not well executed. The text overall shows that the author has thought about the readability of their text in the ways of the reader understanding situation, time, place and character, it also shows that the author has put a hell of a lot of effort into writing the entire text in present tense third person. The ending to this book is naturally the highlight of the text for me, but then again you would have the read the whole book to understand why the ending was the highlight of the text at all. I would say for the reader to make up their own mind, whilst I go back to reading the things I enjoy a bit more than books written in present tense.