Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague
By: Maggie O'Farrell / Narrated By: Ell Potter
Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
Lovingly crafted, yes, but OH, the Narration!!!
We’d just come off a rather disappointing Listen in our little audiobook club when it was my sister’s turn to choose. Lo and wonders, she pulled Hamnet out, and I was thrilled. Both she and I’d read the New York Times book review of Maggie O’Farrell’s latest offering, and to say I was looking forward to diving into the audiobook (Forget dipping a toe in!) is a massive understatement. Generally, I don’t listen to our Picks until a day or two before so that all will be fresh in my mind, but this time?
Oh good golly gosh, I was so THERE! Listened to it early, remembered it all, and here now, eeeeeons after our meeting, it’s still so very clear, so very vivid in my head.
Okay, disclaimer: You know how I’m always whining when it comes to Literary Fiction? About how there’s never any story, fuzzy characters, it’s all about the writing, and oh by the way, there’s-never-a-freaking-story? Well, don’t expect much story here either, and I am soooo not complaining this time. Was it the writing? Was it our heroine, Agnes? Was it the narration?
Yes, yes, and yessss!!!
The audiobook opens with the facts, the very few facts, known about William Shakespeare’s family. And what does O’Farrell do with them?
She crafts one large and extraordinary tale where nothing goes on. The nothing that happens will bring you to your knees by the end because by that time, you’ll care so much, you’ll feel every single grief that has come into your life, every lost love, every void in your heart, every fear that came to pass.
Every joy that blossomed from utter despair.
It all starts with young Hamnet racing around, calling out, frustrated that all are gone and that he is alone with what has just struck terror in his heart. His twin, Judith, is ill, so ill, and he doesn’t know what to do. And then it goes on into non-story, beautifully written, a back and forth between Shakespeare as a frustrated tutor of Latin to the enigmatic and beguiling Agnes, releasing her falcon into the sky.
The two meet and whereas Wil had seen her and wished for a simple bit of fun, he discovers that there’s so much more to the woman, several years his senior. She speaks as an educated young woman, someone worthy of honor and respect.
And thus begins this book of the woman behind the man. It should be noted that, tho’ my sister swears she heard it one time, Shakespeare is never noted by name. He’s simply what he happens to be at the time, to whom he happens to be linked. He is The Tutor, John’s son, Her Husband, The Father. And that suits the unfolding well as he’s but a shadowy figure. Up and coming, yes, but he struggles so to be a person: He is formless, without shape or design.
It is Agnes whom we come to know, this woman who can make a remedy that rivals the silly things the village doctor can concoct. She is wise; she is loving; she is remote but lives with a hand outstretched, welcoming all even as they shun her or whisper behind her back.
As Judith’s illness causes her swift decline, the Plague brought from far off lands in a shipment of glorious beads she felt blessed to see, we see a family in distress. But it’s Hamnet, her twin, who makes the ultimate sacrifice, his love for the other half of him, she who makes him laugh and live, moving him to trick Death.
So then we have the most beautiful words of grief and devastation as the family is torn apart. Wil and Agnes move further and further apart, their two worlds so distant from each other. And Her Husband makes choices that show him to no longer be someone she knows. We listen as she struggles to continue her life, continue to function, learning how to forgive even as she knows she’ll never forget: She KNOWS, this woman of preternatural gifts. How can she go on?
Through all of this, carrying us through the joys of a child looking at the world in wonder, to John’s Son being beaten and humiliated, to Agnes (Anne) devastated and betrayed, all the way to Grief’s utter transmutation to something oh so beautiful, narrator Ell Potter is a low-key powerhouse. She takes a single word and delivers it with such emotion that this is an absolute MUST as a Listen. Yes, O’Farrell writes so beautifully that the written work is sure to engage, but it’s the narration that dazzles. Especially when we come to the end of the book, an ending that is so lovely as to defy description. Yes yes yes, I sped up my listening speed through the middle part of the audiobook but only because I was so engaged that I wanted to learn it all NOW. But by the end? Oh dear, I slowed it down again to savor each lovingly written word, each gorgeously fraught emotion that came hurling left and right to wound, to lacerate, to heal. Stunning performance.
No, I can’t tell you what-all story you’ll find here; can’t sum it up in a line or two. But I CAN tell you I was in a million agonizing pieces towards the end.
And then I was brought together again, wounded but made glorious.
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