Beyond its jumbled chronology and irregular narrative voice, the novel’s rendering of place is lacking. Given that the book is titled Land and framed by the life of a land surveyor, a reader might be forgiven for expecting the characters to experience a deeper attachment to the earth on which they live. But in O’Farrell’s imagined Ireland (which is referred to not by name but as the “dog-shaped island”), land is something neutral, imbued with a kind of strange magic but largely indifferent to the human beings that make their lives upon it. Tomás and his family are not natives but settlers on the peninsula, and their story is just one of many families and individuals before them. They may make a living off the land, but there is no continuity between them and those that came before them, no shared culture or religion or human history passed down through the ages. They are superficially connected to each other by the land and by the supernatural pull of its “holy well,” but they don’t develop a relationship with the land itself—no land ever really becomes home. Then, as the novel progresses, readers even lose sight of both Ireland and the family’s little peninsula as several characters emigrate to different continents.

This disconnection from the land feels in part intentional. Through oppression and tragedy, characters are repeatedly displaced both physically and emotionally. Tomás and Phina were violently uprooted from their homes during the Famine. They can never truly go back, so they are psychologically homeless. They are also tenant farmers, not owners of their own land, and their existence hinges on the external forces of colonialism and the whims of the British aristocrats who extract labor from them. The stories of those who lived before them are similarly fraught with destabilising violence and death: human sacrifice, Viking raids, a Catholic monk killing a druid, warfare, English invasion and cruelty, and slow starvation. Tragedies continue and compound with each successive generation. The metaphysical landscape is one of overlapping traumas warped and bound together across time, complicated further by an undefined encroachment of the supernatural world. The narrative pace of such trials and tribulations is relentless. Healing never comes; the characters suffer without respite or space for growth. The reader is left reeling beneath successive waves of catastrophe, with no truly rooted sense of time, place, or narrative voice from which to anchor the story. 

Beyond their relationships with the land, the characters’ relationships with each other also feel shallow. Almost every protagonist is an outsider, disconnected geographically and socially from any real community, and they make decisions based on their own whims and feelings rather than any loyalty or thought for the family unit. Whenever the narrative of Land is not driven by sweeping external forces of trauma and oppression, it is propelled by characters’ independent desires for self-actualization—whether it’s Tomás and his subsistence farming, Liam and his vocation, or Enda and her pseudo-feminist impulses. While self-knowledge and self-expression are not poor character drivers in themselves, these tropes dominate the narrative so strongly that there is little room for meaningful, believable relationships between the characters; in Land, love is secondary to identity, and that identity itself is untethered to family, people, or tradition. O’Farrell provides the basic scaffolding for strong interpersonal bonds, but in their actions, thoughts, and dialogues, the characters’ desires for self-discovery supersede their relationships with each other. Instead of clan, home, and country, characters act with an individualistic moral framework that feels superimposed by a modern writer.

The best historical fiction can immerse the reader fully in a particular time and place, providing access to the unique lived experiences of its subjects while still revealing to its readers a thread of humanity that persists through every age. O’Farrell is a good writer, and Land is filled with beautiful language and interesting storytelling techniques. Yet ultimately, the novel does not deliver on either the particularities of its time or the universalities of the human condition. Time, place, and narrative voice are muddled and dreamily hazy, and nothing feels rooted or real in a way that makes the historical setting come alive for its readers. At the same time, its characters often seem driven less by timeless values of love and loyalty and more by a contemporary understanding of individual identity and self-actualization. For all its lyrical language and ambitious themes, it never achieves the rootedness—in place, in history, or in human experience—that distinguishes truly great historical fiction.