Maggie O’Farrell, writer: Identity is complicated

0:00Maggie O’Farrell:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:29Maggie O’Farrell:CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that. Bull spend. Now you can invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. You'll reach the right buyers because you can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So cut the bull spend. Advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a 250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash broadcast. That's linkedin.com slash broadcast. Terms and conditions apply. Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions.

1:17Maggie O’Farrell:Join host Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book, How to Change, as she shares true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we make the choices we do and how to make better ones to help avoid costly mistakes. Listen to choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen.

1:42Maggie O’Farrell:Hello, I'm Katie Razzle, the BBC's culture and media editor, and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC, people shaping our world from all over the world. If you're not a little bit afraid, then you're not paying attention. We have never seen a people so united. Do not make that boat crossing. Do not make that journey. Being born in America, feeling American, having people treat me like I'm not. We're more popular than populism. For this interview, I met the acclaimed Northern Ireland-born writer Maggie O 'Farrell at her home in Scotland's capital, Edinburgh.

2:23Maggie O’Farrell:The 54-year-old has been a published author for more than 25 years, with her books translated into more than 44 languages. O 'Farrell shot to wider international fame following her award-winning screen adaptation of her 2020 novel Hamnet, a story about the son of the English playwright William Shakespeare. She's now publishing land, her sweeping new tale centred around an Irish mapmaker working for the British Army at the time of the Great Famine in Ireland in the mid-19th century. Between 1845 and 1852, at least one million people died due to starvation and disease, with a further two million people fleeing Ireland to escape the famine.

3:06Maggie O’Farrell:The book is about colonisation and devastation, set against a backdrop of families left to die of starvation on estates owned by British aristocrats and landowners. Drawing on her own family history during that period, it's O 'Farrell's most political work yet, and as she explains, its themes still resonate with the world today.

3:27Katie Razzall:I think the rise of racism is really, really concerning for everybody, not just Jews, not just Muslims, everybody, I think, and everyone who can be considered by some people to be an other. I think it's really frightening and I think all of us need to work hard at trying to teach our children and teach our children's children about not hating other people for being slightly different from yourself.

3:53Maggie O’Farrell:Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Maggie O 'Farrell.

3:58Katie Razzall:When I was looking in the archives to find out about my great-great-grandfather and his involvement with the Ordnance Survey and I found the date he started working for them was 1848, which, as anyone who's studied history will know, that's two years into the Great Famine. And it just struck me, it really stopped me in my tracks that date. I couldn't imagine what it must have been like because they were doing the sort of second version of the map of Ireland. And it's obvious why those revisions were needed, because this huge cataclysm had swept through the country and as you say a million people has died I mean that's probably a conservative estimate some historians put it as almost double and a further million people again probably more had been forced out and forced to emigrate mostly to North America and so the human geography of Ireland had completely been reconfigured by this disaster and also the physical geography because a lot of the Irish so-called famine relief meant that in order to get relief in order to get some food you had to do some kind of physical work.

5:03Katie Razzall:And so these people who were starving and ill and dying of typhoid and cholera were forced to build roads and dig drainage ditches. And, you know, the roads actually go nowhere. They're called famine roads in Ireland. And you often see them going up hillsides. They jump up the hillside and then they stop. I mean, just seeing them is such a kind of mark of the brutality of that whole release system. It seems awful to even call it a release system. That's what it was called. Definitely not really. So obviously, you know, in terms of, you know, just confining our talk to cartography, they had to revise these because whole villages had been wiped out.

5:36Katie Razzall:You know, estates were redrawn. The Rundale system of farming was reconfigured and so many people had been evicted. So it was necessary to do those revisions. But I couldn't really get my head around what it must have been like doing that work, being someone who'd lived through it.

5:51Maggie O’Farrell:And you do that so powerfully with one of the characters who has, it's been so horrific what's happened that he's blocked out the death of his entire family, leaving him the only one still alive and ending up in the workhouse.

6:07Katie Razzall:Yeah. I mean, the workhouses were, again, they were sort of supposedly relief, but they were quite brutal places. In order to get into them, you had to give up your land. And also parents were separated and children, families were separated. That was a necessity of the workhouse. And, you know, that in itself is such a brutal idea. There were so many houses that were just taken away and evicted and destroyed. They had landlords used gangs with their battering rams to destroy and take the roofs off houses so nobody could go back. And so in order to receive food in the workhouse, you had to give up your land and give up your family.

6:47Maggie O’Farrell:And how did you research the book? You must have done quite a deep dive into some pretty miserable parts of certainly British history and obviously also horrific.

6:54Katie Razzall:Yes, I mean, I think, you know, the family is really hard to think about and read about and write about. It did give me a huge pause because I thought, is this something that should be fictionalised? I'm not really sure. But in a way, if you are going to write about 19th century Ireland and about mapping and about the British colonisation, you can't not. You can't shy away from it. You have to write about it and you have to write about it properly and you have to research it. So I did. I mean, there are books about it and there is a brilliant, beautifully put together famine museum in Roscommon.

7:29Katie Razzall:And there are lots of documentation about it. And, you know, for a long time, there was a weird silence with academic studies about it. I don't know. That's an interesting, there was not much was written about it. And de Valera commissioned the first ever book about it. And then an English woman, Cecil Woodham Smith, wrote a book about it called The Great Hunger. And then obviously over the last, you know, more recent decades, there's been a lot of history books about it and academic studies. And there is, you know, I think famine studies is an established discipline now. And how much of that past do you think is still unresolved when it comes to Britain's role in it, fault in it?

8:06Katie Razzall:I mean, it's a complicated thing. Obviously, the famine has very, very complicated and multiple factors. You know, there is this kind of natural element to it, the bacterium that affected the potatoes. And then there are the very, very long-standing political, socioeconomic circumstances of the British colonial rule. There's also the way that the British government dealt with it and their attitude to it. So there was a man called Charles Trevelyan who was appointed famine release officer. His attitude to the famine is so upsetting and so horrifying. He describes it in a letter as an act of God for an idle, indolent, ungrateful, unself-reliant people.

8:47Katie Razzall:A year after he wrote that letter, he was given a knighthood for his work in feminine relief. So Chevelyan holds that knighthood to this day. I would quite like the British government to rescind it. I think it's long, long overdue.

8:59Maggie O’Farrell:Is this the beginning of the campaign?

9:02Katie Razzall:It's not a campaign. I'm just inviting a bit of thought about this. He owned lots of slaves in Grenada, which and his family, to be fair to them, have apologised about that and they have addressed it. But I would quite like this knighthood to be addressed. I don't think he should have it.

9:17Maggie O’Farrell:Yes, and in the book, obviously, you were talking about mapping being about power and subjugation and colonisation and resistance. And there's a bit what they want is for this peninsula and for the whole country to be left in peace. History has other plans. It is decided that the larger country, that's Britain, should claim its dog-shaped neighbour, Ireland, to tame it, to subjugate it before anyone else does. And when I say it's political, that's what it feels. Do you think that Britain still hasn't fully acknowledged and atoned for the wrongs of the history of Ireland?

9:49Katie Razzall:Oh, wow, that's a big question. It is. I mean, there have been prime ministers who have apologised for their role in it, which I think has been very good. And I think, you know, relations between Britain and Ireland have improved so much, you know, and I'm amused now by there's so many people in Britain who are trying to get an Irish passport. It's quite... To get back into the EU. Yeah, exactly, to get back into the EU. Everyone's scrabbling for an Irish grandparent. So, I don't know. I mean, it's not that I wanted to reawaken all that hostility, not at all. The interesting thing to me is, you know, I mean, we moved to Britain in the 70s, of course, when relationships between Britain and Ireland were very fraught, you know, and it was not easy, actually, to be Irish in Britain at that time.

10:37Katie Razzall:We got on awful. And the kind of thin end of the wedge was lots of Irish jokes. And the other end of the wedge was teachers looking me in the face as a child and saying, is your dad in the IRA? How did that affect you? How did that shape you, do you think? I don't know. I mean, weirdly, I mean, I think about it now, it's horrifying. But at the time, it just made me a bit kind of nervous. And, you know, it was sort of, and I think, well, you know, my dad's a mild-mannered economics teacher. Of course he's not. But even up until the point I was working, you know, at a newspaper in the early 90s in London, and my dad must have phoned me while I was away from my desk.

11:13Katie Razzall:And one of my colleagues said, oh, it's so funny. Whenever I speak to your dad, I always think he's going to give us a five minute warning. By that point, I was in my 20s and I said to this person, it's not OK to say that. You know, I was no longer a 10-year-old child in a schoolroom. And they kind of laughed it off and I said, can you not say that that's not all right? You're implying my dad's a terrorist bomber. And it was a strange moment. Everybody was slightly offended by my fury at that. I don't think that would happen now, would it? Well, I don't know. I hope not. As I was saying, I think relations have improved so much.

11:48Katie Razzall:But I don't know. I don't know whether it's just because people are less racist or because maybe there are newer waves of immigrants who are absorbing that kind of hostility, unfortunately. I don't know.

11:58Maggie O’Farrell:Clearly, your book is focused on Ireland, but, you know, it feels very timely with all the border disputes around the world, whether it's the Middle East or Ukraine or Russia. You know, we know that maps are a one way that people who, you know, want to subjugate another or take over their land or whatever, that that is what happens. And I wondered whether you felt that that prejudice that you faced as an Irish child, that that has actually transferred to other people, whether that is Jews in Britain and what they're going through now or indeed Muslims or whoever.

12:32Katie Razzall:I think the rise of racism is really, really concerning for everybody, not just Jews, not just Muslims, everybody, I think, and everyone who can be considered by some people to be another. Yeah, I think it's really frightening. And I think all of us need to work hard at trying to teach our children and teach our children's children about not hating other people for being slightly different from yourself.

13:01Maggie O’Farrell:You're listening to The Interview from the BBC World Service.

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14:38Maggie O’Farrell:for that. Bull spend. Now you can invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. You'll reach the right buyers because you can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So cut the bull spend. Advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a 250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash broadcast. That's linkedin.com slash broadcast. Terms and conditions apply. When I rang the doorbell of Maggie O 'Farrell's Edinburgh home, it was with a little bit of trepidation.

15:23Maggie O’Farrell:Would the acclaimed author have become a bit starry after the whirlwind few months she's just had, jet-setting between the UK and the US, schmoozing with the Hollywood A-list and winning awards for her role adapting her novel Hamnet for the big screen. I needn't have worried that she has had her head turned by LA goodie bags and limos on tap. She opened the door with a big smile, offered me and my colleagues tea and told us the whole experience had been completely surreal. OK, let's return to my conversation with Maggie O 'Farrell. Getting back to land, I know that you do like mysticism. And this book, you've got a talking fish in a pool, a forbidden corpse, a sacrificial burial thousands of years ago.

16:06Maggie O’Farrell:Why did you want to go down that sort of mystical side of the story?

16:10Katie Razzall:Well, I think with this book, I was trying to do two things, one of which is to tell the story of a family who are endeavouring to survive in the long shadow of the great hunger. But also I wanted to tell or I wanted to set myself the task of telling the whole story of Ireland right from the start. I mean, I say from the first inhabitants, but actually there's one clause that goes back to the Ice Age. So I wanted to tell the whole story of Ireland just by one plot of land. No big feed. No big task. Well, I think it's really good to set yourself a new task or to learn something new with every book.

16:43Katie Razzall:So this is what I wanted to do. You know, it's very important to me. When I was a child, my father would only ever read us Irish myths. We used to beg him to stop and read, you know, I don't know, Pippi Longstocking or Secret Garden. He never would to read Irish myths, which at the time I was a bit annoyed by. but actually now I'm quite glad because it does form a kind of certain bedrock in my sense of narrative, I think. But in those myths and in those stories, the land or the landscape, the Irish land and landscape is actually animate. Trees talk and have opinions and rocks open up and people are living inside them and mountainsides shift.

17:19Katie Razzall:And I wanted to get a sense of that kind of mystical animism as much as I could into the novel. As somebody who I think I understand that you see yourself as Irish and British, is that right? Both?

17:32Maggie O’Farrell:Both and neither, really.

17:33Katie Razzall:Both and neither. It's very confusing. When people ask me where I'm from, I think they expect one word, but I usually have to give them a paragraph.

17:41Maggie O’Farrell:Fair enough. What is that paragraph?

17:42Katie Razzall:Well, I was born in Canterbury and then I moved to Wales and then I moved to Ireland. Yeah, it's very complicated. And I feel there's a strange sense. You know, I think if you grow up somewhere different from where you were born, and that's just true of everyone, I think, Or if your accent doesn't match your name, as in my case, you walk alongside all your life a kind of ghost self and there's always a sense of who would I have been if we'd stayed. You know, what would I have been like? I would have sounded different, you know, because I don't have even a trace of an Irish accent. You know, my life would have been so different.