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I read this ahead of a Book Group in June 2021 having previously read it in early April 2020 (just after the start of lockdown). In the comments below the review I have added my notes from the author’s brilliantly produced interview with Peter Florence at the 2020 virtual Hay Festival.

This book was on my radar since the Guardian’s Alex Preston in his 2020 preview said it was the book that might beat Hilary Mantel to her third Booker.

The book of course beat Hiliary Mantel won the 2020 Women's Prize, the 2020 Waterstone's Book of the Year (from the UK's best bookseller), the National Book Critics Circle Award (one of the very few US awards open to UK writers), the 2021 British Book Awards Best Fiction "Nibbie" and so on.

It was also, to the considerable deteriment of the Booker not even longlisted for that prize (which was distinguished in 2021 only by its Winner). That omission I think resulted in its unusual shortlisting for the 2020 Guardian Not The Booker (unusual in that the Guardian website BTL votes which are used to pick half that shortlist are normally dominated by author and publisher lead campaigns on small books) - a prize for which the judges (of which I was one) decided it was too good to be a winner.

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My thematic thoughts on the book - including some extensive quotes, best read after completion of the book.

COMPARISONS TO MANTEL (AND GREGORY) �� STYLE OF FIRST TWO THIRDS

And comparisons to Mantel’s book are inevitable �� a book set in the 16th Century, featuring a famous Englishmen in an unfamiliar way, and written in a third person point of view present tense. A comparison made even more inevitable when the book’s opening lines include a confused child and the words “He stumbles as he lands, falling to his knees on the flagstone floor�� which to the reader immediately evokes Mantel's opening words of he trilogy “he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard�� which follow the now-famous ”So now get up��.

There however the two books depart �� both in subject matter and style.

Whereas Cromwell is the sole focus of Mantel’s book(s), so much so that the third party style is really as close as possible to a first party narrative; Shakespeare, while featuring as a point of view character, is very much a tertiary one (and in fact only ever referred to in indirect terms (the tutor, the husband, the father) , with the narrative initially started by his son Hamnet (twin to Judith) and largely sustained by his wife �� Agnes (perhaps better know to us as Ann Hathaway).

With as an aside a throwaway line later in the book which links to almost all we know of her (via the reference in her husband’s will)

[She] refuses to give up her bed, saying it was the bed she was married in and she will not have another, so the new, grander bed is put in the room for guests.

Agnes herself is portrayed as following her dead mother as something of a white witch/folk and natural healer/forest folk/mystical diviner.

I was inevitably reminded less of Mantel and more of that other great modern day chronicler of the Tudor Court �� Philippa Gregory, and in particular her Cousins War series and particularly the character of Jacquetta of Luxembourg and her relationship with Elizabeth Woodville in “White Queen�� and “Lady of the Rivers��. That is not to damn the book with faint praise, both books are excellent, but it was a little unexpected in a purely literary novel. Like Gregory, O'Farrell uses this as a way for a female to gain strong agency in a fundamentally patriarchal society (at least in this section we see that Anne's pregnancy, resulting marriage and even Will's move to London are all engineered by her).

And while Mantel’s tale sustains throughout a sense of immediacy, of imminent peril, of ever present danger in a court subject to the arbitrary caprices of a tyrant, for the first two thirds of the book, this is written in an indirect, very distanced style. The style of course reflects the character �� not a necessarily paranoid man-of-the-world, painstakingly aware of the precariousness of his ascent and the multitude wishing his fall; but instead someone who is by their very identity other-worldly, possessed of both ancient knowledge and foresight and who therefore operates at a necessary remove from both the here and the now.

This style though does make the first two thirds of the book at times a rather too languid experience.

MIRRORING

One interesting break is a section where we trace the course of the plague

For the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet. The first is a glassmaker on the island of Murano in the principality of Venice; the second is a cabin boy on a merchant ship sailing for Alexandria on an unseasonably warm morning with an easterly wind.

And this account is very cleverly mirrored a little later �� in an account of the convoluted passage of a letter sent to Shakespeare telling him of Judith’s seemingly imminent death with even some small details mirrored (such as some unevenly balanced baskets).

Mirroring being a crucial theme of the book �� with Judith and Hamnet as slightly odd twins (seemingly identical other than in their sex)

It’s like a mirror, he had said. Or that they are one person split down the middle. Their two

He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him. How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain. Tears are appearing on her cheeks now, like silver seeds, as if by magic. He knows they are his, falling from his eyes on to her face, but they could just as easily be hers. They are one and the same. ‘You shall be well,�� she murmurs. He grips her fingers in anger. ‘I shall not.�� He passes his tongue over his lips, tasting salt. ‘I’ll come with you. We’ll go together.��

Ideas which the author expands into a plot point which of course draws on the use of mistaken identity and doubles in their father’s work:

Then the idea strikes him. He doesn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. It occurs to Hamnet, as he crouches there, next to her, that it might be possible to hoodwink Death, to pull off the trick he and Judith have been playing on people since they were young: to exchange places and clothes, leading people to believe that each was the other.

MODERN DAY RESONANCE

Another fascinating aspect of this first section �� which effectively leads up to the (real life) death of Hamnet �� is the many accidental resonances with our present day situation, resonances which I suspect increase the already high chances of this book winning literary prize acclaim.

The way the plague spreads not just in England but also in Northern Italy (and the links between the two)

The fleas that leapt from the dying rats into their striped fur crawl down into these boxes and take up residence in the rags padding the hundreds of tiny, multi-coloured millefiori beads (the same rags put there by the fellow worker of the master glassmaker; the same glassmaker who is now in Murano, where the glassworks is at a standstill, because so many of the workers are falling ill with a mysterious and virulent fever).

The inadequacy of Personal Protective Equipment for English medical staff:

It is tall, cloaked in black, and in the place of a face is a hideous, featureless mask, pointed like the beak of a gigantic bird. ‘No,�� Hamnet cries, ‘get away.�� .. Then his grandmother is there, pushing him aside, apologising to the spectre, as if there is nothing out of the ordinary about it, inviting it to step into the house, to examine the patient. Hamnet takes a step backwards and another. He collides with his mother, ‘Don’t be afraid,�� she whispers. ‘It is only the physician.�� ‘The . . .?�� Hamnet stares at him, still there on the doorstep, talking with his grandmother. ‘But why is he . . .?�� Hamnet gestures to his face, his nose. ‘He wears that mask because he thinks it will protect him,�� she says. ‘From the pestilence?�� His mother nods. ‘And will it?�� His mother purses her lips, then shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so.��

Lockdowns

The spectre is speaking without a mouth, saying he will not come in, he cannot, and they, the inhabitants, are hereby ordered not to go out, not to take to the streets, but to remain indoors until the pestilence is past.

The guilty upside of the events for children of busy parents

If the plague comes to London, he can be back with them for months. The playhouses are all shut, by order of the Queen, and no one is allowed to gather in public. It is wrong to wish for plague, her mother has said, but Susanna has done this a few times under her breath, at night, after she has said her prayers. She always crosses herself afterwards. But still she wishes it. Her father home, for months, with them. She sometimes wonders if her mother secretly wishes it too.

Misplaced faith in unlikely treatments (hydroxychloroquin anyone?)

‘Madam,�� the physician says, and again his beak swings towards them, ‘you may trust that I know much more about these matters than you do. A dried toad, applied to the abdomen for several days, has proven to have great efficacy in cases such as these.

And the realisation that whatever contingency planning healers have done is powerless in the face of what they are confronted with

She thinks of her garden, of her shelves of powders, potions, leaves, liquids, with incredulity, with rage. What good has any of that been? What point was there to any of it? All those years and years of tending and weeding and pruning and gathering. She would like to go outside and rip up those plants by their roots and fling them into the fire. She is a fool, an ineffectual, prideful fool. How could she ever have thought that her plants might be a match for this?

FINAL THIRD & GEORGE SAUNDERS

Any frustration at the slightly slow pace of the first parts, is really overcome in the final section, which deals with the aftermath of Hamnet’s death. Following on from Agnes’s realisation both that her healing powers were inadequate in the face of plague and that her foresight has actually mislead her and forced her to concentrate on the wrong risks (Judith rather than Hamnet) she is thrust back into the real world and the removal of time and place is taken away.

What we get instead is a fierce and painful examination of the grief of a mother and a more oblique examination of how that grief played out in the work of her husband.

Of the way it unmoors all of our pretensions to control

What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.

That includes a moving burial scene which cannot help remind the reader of another Booker winner - “Lincoln in the Bardo��

It is even more difficult, Agnes finds, to leave the graveyard, than it was to enter it. So many graves to walk past, so many sad and angry ghosts tugging at her skirts, touching her with their cold fingers, pulling at her, naggingly, piteously, saying, Don’t go, wait for us, don’t leave us here.

And then moves into helplessness

And Agnes finds she can bear anything except her child’s pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusion, but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief.

HAMNET AND HIS FATHER’S WORK

Agnes realises that rather than bringing her family together �� her husband will instead move away from her and be absorbed in his work (her influence over him declining with her powers) �� leaving her not so much for London but

‘the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child. I see this,��

That (and this was one of the inspirations for the writing of this book) that he will never reference plague directly in his work (as has already been noted by his daughter even in his speech)

It is also plague season again in London and the playhouses are shut. This is never said aloud. Judith notes the absence of this word during his visits.

That a playwright who gave so many words to the English language is not even available to help his family find the words that they need

What is the word, Judith asks her mother, for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin?

But, in a tour de force ending to this excellent book that he will examine the death in his own way and via his most famous play.

Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. ‘O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!�� murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.

Overall - magnificent