REVIEW OF HAMNET

BY TOM WELLS

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

 

Open kimono. The reason I didn't rate this book one star is that I didn't want to appear sexist in regard to the winner of the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. But in the afterglow of the latest JFDI gathering, I've come to regard it as not just bad but contemptible. For here a writer, of all professions, portrays the greatest writer in the language in which she writes as, first, a callow Latin teacher, later, an absentee father and, finally, a canny real estate investor. Forget his other-worldly facility with the written and spoken word. 

 

But then it's the novel's greatest strength that Maggie O'Farrell avoids exposing the weakness of her own prose (rhetorical questions? really?) by going toe-to-toe with The Bard. Instead, she opts for a hackneyed cast of characters--the abusive father, the shrewish mother-in-law, the sensitive boy, the sickly girl--straight out of a Harlequin romance before pivoting to a heroine cribbed from the Twilight series.

 

For Anne "Agnes" Hathaway is not just your run-of-the-mill 16th C. wife and mother. No, she has powers far beyond those of mortal men, even (or especially) one who cranked out 38 plays and 154 sonnets in 24 short years. She is clairvoyant. She communes with nature. She gets to the true soul of plants and animals and people, not wasting her time on merely making memorable, incisive and enduring observations about the human condition. 

 

Sadly, she lacks healing powers, and so her daughter suffers from a host of childhood maladies while her son dies of a sudden illness. That son is Hamnet, a name interchangeable with Hamlet. The way that Agnes is interchangeable with Anne. The way that this book is interchangeable with loo paper. 

** but really *