A book club read, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell is another great read of 2024, for me. I’m even going to call it a favorite. It has little things (and one big thing) wrong with it, but overall, it is an amazing book that deserves book club reads and awards and whatnot. It helps that I am a Shakespeare nerd and attend every Renaissance festival (in cosplay) whenever I can, but if you aren’t either of those things, you could still appreciate this book for its writing style, historical immersion, and creative storytelling.

This novel is built around O’Farrell wondering why William Shakespeare had a young son named Hamnet who died, and then wrote the play Hamlet a few years later, which seems to have nothing to do with his child (about either a very juvenile or mentally unwell king). According to O’Farrell’s research, btw, “Hamlet” and “Hamnet” are the same name. Variations, I guess? Or different spellings from an age without standardized spelling? The truth is, history tells us very little about Shakespeare, so the known facts are these: he married a woman named Anne (or Annis or Agnes, according to O’Farrell). They had a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet died as a child (age 11?), of what–we don’t know. Shakespeare bought the second-biggest house in Stratford-Upon-Avon, later, and he did spend much of his time and long stretches of life in London, away from his family. A few years after Hamnet died, Hamlet hit the “stage” on an East India Company ship. The rest of the story in this novel, pretty much, is complete fiction, but is based on intrepid research and so is historical in a non-Shakespeare-centric way.

In the novel, the story centers around Agnes, the mother of the doomed Hamnet, but perspective does change frequently between several of the characters, including the children and the husband (who is unnamed, and we well talk about that in a minute). We know from the start that poor Hamnet–this energetic, sweet child–is going to die, but the book is still constructed of tension, filled with flashbacks to Agnes’ and the tutor’s courtship and earlier marriage. The tagline on the cover is “a novel of the plague,” and that’s another question O’Farrell had: why did Shakespeare never mention the plague in any of his writings, even though it was a prominent feature of the times? The plague is essentially another character, present from the first pages, moving into the background and back into the forefront, repeatedly. But the novel is really about motherhood, grief, and magic/nature, as well as family and the turn of the 17th century in England.

Ya’ll, the fact that I’m calling this book a favorite—five stars!—and it is in present tense is a big deal. I mean, I have read books before that really belonged in the present tense and so that was fine, though painful. But this book had no business being in the present tense. But I liked it so much, I’m gonna let that slide. I did read this book for a book club that I was auditioning (?), sampling (?) in January. However, it was on my radar even before that, because I kept seeing it on lists of best books of the 2020s. It was published in 2020. It has a pretty and memorable cover. And I perk up at anything Shakespeare-related.

So, one of the things that I think this book got wrong is something that many people (obviously O’Farrell included) think she did right. It’s very intentional. And that is not mentioning Shakespeare’s name, not even once. Not even a nickname. Which is kind of an impressive trick—to write an entire novel and never mention one of the character’s names—without them having to be the sole POV character in a first-person perspective. While this is technically impressive, I found it distracting and a little silly. I mean, I know it’s a novel. It’s not true to whoever Shakespeare really was (except perhaps by some massive coincidence). But it is clearly based on Shakespeare, and I don’t think calling him “William” would have distracted from Agnes’ and Hamnet’s story as much as not including his name at all. I get it. But I rolled my eyes.

I also thought (as did others) that it lagged or sagged now and again, especially in the middle. It was constructed in parts, the death being a key moment but not the end of the story, and sometimes we lost interest in one thing before the next thing gained momentum. Also, the ending is kinda interesting, which I mean pejoratively, I think. I like the idea of the ending, but tonally it was discordant from the rest of the book. Like, I like what it said, but I didn’t love the scenes that got me there. And I don’t know if this is negative exactly, but there are some major mood shifts in this book. Last thing I have to say in the con- column is that I didn’t really find the husband to be believable as Shakespeare. His writing (and acting) and his writing-as-therapy seemed to come out of left field for this guy. I liked the tutor, but I didn’t think he could be the Shakespeare who wrote all the stuff I’ve read and studied. This isn’t just a problem for some Shakespeare nerd, but for the text, because the husband does go to London and become a prolific and successful playwright and actor, and I found that a stretch for the character.

As for all the amazing things about this novel, they include the way O’Farrell describes things. I was thinking that she is a list-describer (which is what I call myself), meaning that she pulls minute details to set an immersive scene, without giving full, lengthy descriptions. But she is more than that. In Hamnet, O’Farrell never stops moving, and her characters never stop moving. I can’t say if she ever wrote “said,” but she is a master at dialogue happening while action does not cease. The lips are moving and the character is still living, which I found wonderful and realistic, as well as compelling and exciting. Also, the book is either magic realism or almost-magic realism, written about a time that was more mystical than our own, and I love magic realism. There is movement, too, through the book that ebbs and flows not just with the flashbacks and then chronological “present,” but in the repetition of scenes and the changing of perspectives. She even moves through the narrative with objects—like a letter or the plague. I loved this dance, this sort of swooping storytelling. We know what’s going to happen (in part, at least), but we are on a ride, tension held taught even so.

To be honest, I also found O’Farrell’s writing to be similar enough to my own (in style, themes, and scene-building, not skill level) that it was uncomfortable. Like there are at least two scenes in this book that are basically in my two, first novels (including the letter-following scene I mentioned already). It’s not like word for word (I’m not accusing anyone of plagiarism), but it’s squirm-inducing. We think and write an awful lot alike, which I think makes plenty of authors squirm when they encounter it. Perhaps appropriately, according to a person in my book club, the lesson of this book is that the things we worry about are not the things that are gonna’ bite us in the ass in the end.

Oh, and I almost forgot; this book has one of the most effective and least explicit sex scenes I have ever read. It is a feat of creativity, of ingenuity and artistry. And it opens up possibilities for what can be conveyed with metaphor and obliqueness.

Good or bad, the grief in this novel is particularly realistic, which caused some of the readers in group significant pain. One of them couldn’t finish. Another finished but said it was like being tortured. If you are going to be upset by intimate writing and characterization regarding death, especially death of a child, then maybe you should delay the reading of this book. Although I might qualify for this, I just thought it was well-done and poignant.

So, I did want to address a few historical things before I wrap it up. First, I am a little confused about the Hamnet/Hamlet thing, because Hamlet was based on a historical figure, like many of Shakespeare’s plays were. Hamlet was based on the Danish ruler, Amleth, from Saxo Gramatticus, so I would think “Hamlet” is an English version of that name. Therefore, I would have assumed Hamlet had nothing to do with Shakespeare’s son, and I might even assume it was just a common name. And a coincidence. Furthermore, ­Ur-Hamlet, an early version of the play, has been dated to around 1587, and Hamnet didn’t die until 1596. Which means the two things might have been named awfully close together, and long before Hamnet’s death. Moving on to the next thing—and this is not a spoiler—the last line of Hamnet is “Remember me.” I thought that Hamlet’s ghost said that in parting in Hamlet, but I was too embarrassed to bring it up at book club when I thought of it. It is, though. So that’s a reference. And one last thing, I was a little confused about the wool in the attic in the story. (Actually, that was another thing that I (and others) wasn’t impressed with: there was a story line that seemed important and then it was dropped.) Talking with other people at book club and doing some thinking, I believe that the wool in the attic is supposed to imply that Shakespeare’s dad (John) has been skimming wool when he has the Hathaways’ sheep sheered before skinning the sheep to make gloves from their hides. They had a deal, which I would guess (in the fiction) was that John would buy the sheep under the condition that the wool (and maybe other bits) remained the property of the farmer. Then when he returned the wool, he put his finger on the scale, so to speak, and kept some back for himself, hidden away. I understand that wool was as good as currency, at the time.

So, yeah, I found much to love about this novel, including its beauty as a piece of art. I would definitely recommend it, but with some trigger warnings about death and grief, especially the death of a child. You should probably just go ahead now and accept it as almost completely fiction, but also expect it to take you back to the Renaissance more successfully than anything else I’ve ever read. I think I’ll be reading it again. I recommend that you read it, as well.

Maggie O’Farrell is an Irish author who now in Scotland. She is a member of the Royal Society of Literature, which sounds amazing. Her books have won a lot of prizes and been shortlisted for some other awards, too. She studied English Literature at Cambridge and has been a world traveler, journalist, editor, and creative writing teacher (professor?). All her reviews hover around four stars and have critical acclaim, except that Hamnet‘s rating are higher. She is married to a writer (William Sutcliffe) with three kids, one of whom has extreme allergies, which she shares about in her memoir and deals with in one of her novels.

Her titles are:

“Her brother, Bartholmew, with the wide, surprised eyes and fingers that opened into white stars, rode on their mother’s front and the two of them could stare into each other’s faces as they went along, interlace their fingers over the round bones of their mother’s shoulders” (p44).

“The two of them can gripe and prickle and rub each other the wrong way; they can argue and bicker and sigh; they can throw into the pig-pen food the other has coolked because it is too salted or not milled finely enough or too spiced; they can raise and eyebrow at each other’s darning or stitching or embroidery. In a time such as this, however, they can operate like two hands of the same person” (109).

“Life has been sweeping them all along together, in step, she had thought. And now this” (p155).

“She sees how she, Agnes, must remain calm, steady, must make herself bigger, in a way, to keep the house on an even keel, not to allow it to be taken over by this darkness, to square up to it, to shield Susanna from it, to seal off her own cracks, not to let it in” (p158).

“She has created this moment—no one else—and yet, now it is happening, she finds that it is entirely at odds with what she desires” (p176).

“She thinks, This cannot happen, it cannot, how will we live, what will we do, how can Judith bear it, what will I tell people, how can we continue, what should I have done, where is my husband, what will he say, how could I have saved him, why didn’t I save him, why didn’t I realize it was he who was in danger? And then, the focus narrows, and she thinks: He is dead, he is dead, he is dead” (p119).

“How is anyone ever to shut the eyes of their dead child? How is it possible to find two pennies and rest them there, in the eye sockets, to hold down the lids? How can anyone do this? It is not right. It cannot be” (p221).

There is a movie version of Hamnet under production, apparently. I don’t know how I feel about this. It is such an interior and lyrical novel that I am having a hard time imagining how they can capture it in a movie. I guess we’ll see.

There is also a play (different adaptation, altogether) playing in London to much acclaim, but it is doubtful that I will ever have the chance to see that. But you never know. It could travel stateside; I’m still holding my breath for The Cursed Child, which opened in London in 2016.