Arts, Books, Literature

Book Review: Land by Maggie O’Farrell

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Set in the decades after the Great Hunger, “Land” is a rich portrait of family life amid Ireland’s long struggle against British rule

Cartography has never been a neutral discipline. Maps offer a partial view of a landscape, informed by what the mapmaker wishes the reader to see. A colonising army will mark the features of the terrain that serves its purposes and exclude inconvenient signs of prior habitation. And they will do this in their own language.

“Land”, Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th novel, is set in Ireland in the 1860s. It has been more than a decade since the Great Hunger killed over a million people and forced an even higher number into exile, and the landscape is dotted with empty villages and over-full graves. Tomás – an Irish cartographer working for the British “redcoats” – and his young son, Liam, are charting a remote peninsula on the country’s west coast when Tomás has a sudden, revelatory experience at a pre-Christian holy spring.

What he encounters there inspires him to abandon his office job and counter the efforts of his erstwhile employers by drawing his own, dissident map of the area. It will reconstitute the terrain as its inhabitants understand it, in their language, honouring the communities that have been annihilated, the woods and waterways that rightly belong to them, and the old cultural landmarks the British have no use for.

The task, for Tomás, is personal: both he and his wife, Phina, were orphans of the Hunger, forced from their rural lives into urban workhouses. He moves his family from Dublin to the countryside as an act of reclamation and renewal. Phina, however, is more ambivalent. She worries about money now that her husband has foregone his regular salary, and about her daughters’ future prospects given that in their new village Catholic schooling is reserved for boys.

Like much of the author’s previous work, including her most famous, the 2020 book “Hamnet” – adapted into a 2025 film by Chloé Zhao – “Land” is a historical novel with O’Farrell’s signature interest in absorbing family relationships. The first half of the narrative sows the seeds of a defiant, multigenerational reckoning with the British Empire, and to an extent the Catholic Church. We encounter a windswept landscape; a menacing, nameless viscount; a kindly widow who represents all the grieving folk of the land; and a condescending priest. O’Farrell takes us on a lively deep dive into the land’s prehistory – a place of hill forts, druids, wanderers and wolfhounds, where virgins are ritually sacrificed to stave off bad weather.

Great period novels balance larger historical context with personal details and textures, and at first “Land” feels poised to do just that, deftly situating a rich portrait of family life amid Ireland’s centuries-long struggle against British rule.

But as the novel proceeds, this promise largely dissolves. Tomás’s cartographic ambitions, initially presented as the story’s engine, fall from focus as the story shifts to his children’s comings of age and their own varied relationships to the Irish diaspora across the British Empire.

Unfortunately, O’Farrell leaves these relationships and their wider ramifications mostly unexplored. Liam joins the Jesuits and travels as a missionary to South India, where he briefly considers the connection between his role and that of the British in Ireland, but ultimately loses his faith because of homesickness rather than any true engagement with the locals’ plight.

– A sweeping historical family saga set primarily in post-Famine Ireland. The novel blends themes of cartography, colonialism, family bonds, and the deep connection between people and the land

His sister Enda journeys to Quebec on an emigration permit she’s stolen from Liam, and struggles to make a living there as a domestic labourer and street musician. She meets her love interest in the immigration line: an Eastern European teacher turned cook who picks up work as a logger in the summers to make enough money to bring the rest of his family to Canada. But the novel pulls its punches when it comes to the parallels between deforestation in the Americas and that in Ireland.

Nonetheless, O’Farrell’s writing is propulsive and luscious throughout, and there are some emotive and moving passages told from the perspective of Phina’s nonverbal youngest child, Eugene. But the problems with “Land” stem from its reluctance to question the moral clarity of its core characters. They are all unimpeachably good. Tomás loses his grip on reality, and their other daughter, Rose, resents her siblings for leaving her behind on the peninsula; but the real darkness in the novel lies outside the family unit – with the redcoats, the viscount, and the church. The evils of imperialism do not require its victims, real or imagined, to be pure and incorruptible, especially when their own migrations make them the dominant presence in other colonies.

At its best, “Land” evokes weighty, time-slip novels like Alan Garner’s “Red Shift”, drawing associative lines across eras and grappling with the long afterlives of colonial violence. But there is no doubt it is deflated by characters whose confrontations with the forces around them are too shallow to constitute a serious reckoning with the moral dilemmas the novel poses at the start.

– Land by Maggie O’Farrell is published by Knopf (an imprint of Penguin), 384pp

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Art, Arts, Exhibitions, Second World War

Exhibition – Winston Churchill: The Painter

WALLACE COLLECTION

Serenity: Winston Churchill’s Cap d’Ail, Alpes-Maritimes (1952)

Xavier Bray, the director of the Wallace Collection, recently described the London gallery’s new exhibition of Winston Churchill’s paintings as “provocative”.

Churchill didn’t take up painting as a hobby until he was 40 years of age, perhaps to distract himself following the disastrous Dardanelle campaign of 1915 (for which, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he was held responsible), but he became besotted with the medium, and sought out artistic instruction from masters including John Lavery, Walter Sickert, and William Nicholson. Before his death at the age of 90 in 1965, Churchill produced more than 500 oil paintings.

Yet, astonishingly, there hasn’t been a British retrospective of his work since 1959. According to one commonly held view, this is because his “daubs”, as he described them, simply aren’t up to scratch.

He may have won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 – writing was his main source of income for most of his life having authored dozens of books and penned countless journalistic pieces – but, surely, nobody in their right mind would honour his amateurish paintings, despite the enthusiasm with which he set about them while wearing a bespoke painting coat tailored by Henry Poole & Co. All of this done in his studio on Chartwell’s 80-acre estate, where he stored pigments in a cigar humidor presented to him by the Cuban government.

On the evidence, though, of Winston Churchill: The Painter, he was hardly as bad as all that. On occasion, he was even surprisingly decent, as demonstrated by a display of Moroccan landscapes, including a view of the Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakech that achieved £8.3m at auction when it was sold by Angelina Jolie in 2021.

Painted in 1943, it was the only canvas he produced during the Second World War. He gave it to his friend and fellow wartime leader Franklin D Roosevelt, whom he’d persuaded to accompany him on a trip to Marrakech immediately after the Casablanca conference – to, as he put it, “see the sunset on the snows of the Atlas Mountains”. According to Bray, Churchill often gifted his paintings to important people, including three consecutive American presidents, as a form of “soft power”.

You can tell that, like many artists before him, Churchill loved painting in North Africa, where, while working en plein air, he would attract a curious crowd. His Moroccan compositions may lack the blazing audacity of, say, those by Henri Matisse or others in the Fauvism movement, but their combinations of dusky pinks, cool lavenders and greens still satisfy.

While stick figures populate some of Churchill’s Moroccan views, Bray and his co-curator, Lucy Davis, wisely omit his paintings of people, which can appear ham-fisted. Instead, they prefer to present an attractive selection of about 60 of his still lifes and landscapes, including serene, sun-soaked vistas of holiday destinations in Italy and along the Côte d’Azur (as well as in Morocco).

This specific subject matter may reflect the fact that painting for Churchill was a way to relieve strain – which he wrote about brilliantly in his essay Painting as a Pastime. (He found similar solace in bricklaying.) His compositions in this mode are easy on the eye and inoffensive. The best examples are preoccupied with capturing complex reflections on the surface of water.

On occasions, there is a hint of warfare – although the exhibition sidesteps controversial talk about imperialism. A squat black Napoleonic cannon facing mainland Europe in the foreground of The Beach at Walmer is surely a sort of self-portrait, given the painting’s date of 1938. Otherwise, though, this is painting as escapism.

Sometimes, this means that Churchill’s pictures are insipid or banal. Too many appear like inexpert imitations of Post-Impressionist paintings, which he admired. Several are blighted by boring, unmodulated passages and feel stilted. With little to analyse aesthetically, the labels rely heavily on anecdotes (although this could invoke fun). A quarter bottle of Pol Roger is on show in the first gallery, alongside his spectacles. Supposedly, it contained the last bubbly he ever drank.

Yet, almost everything that Churchill brushed conveys his infectious passion for the art form and, occasionally, a painting by him really comes together. A view from about 1924 of sun-struck snow surrounding the Chartwell estate (which Churchill purchased in 1922 and loved dearly) is delicious.

A 1932 canvas of a goldfish pool fringed with greenery near the house – which Churchill often painted, possibly in homage to Claude Monet’s depictions of his water garden at Giverny – is enlivened with undulating curls and slivers of orange, like sinuous Wotsits, representing fish beneath its rippled surface.

Forget the august aura of the artist who produced it. Considered purely as a painting, it hits the mark.

– The Wallace Collection, London W1, runs until November 26                                                                                                                                                    

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Britain, Defence, Military, National Security

Recce-Strike: A new concept in warfare

DEFENCE

Colonel de Bretton-Gordon who commanded the 1st Royal Tank Regiment has written on the new concept of warfare known as “Recce-Strike”.

The former commander, and now a writer and author, says the British Army has finally planted its flag in the ground over the future of land warfare, embracing the Recce-Strike doctrine laid out in the Ministry of Defence’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR).

In many respects, this is being seen as one of the most important conceptual shifts in British military thinking since the end of the Cold War. Crucially, it recognises the brutal realities of modern combat, witnessed daily on the battlefields of Ukraine, where drones, sensors, and rapid precision strikes have fundamentally changed warfare.

Defence has judged that future lethality will come roughly 80pc from drones and autonomous systems, and just 20pc from traditional armoured platforms and artillery. The Colonel says this is both bold and correct. The evidence from Ukraine, he says, is overwhelming. The side that can find, identify, and destroy targets fastest is the side that survives. The Ukrainians, despite chronic shortages in ammunition and equipment, have become masters of this new form of warfare and remain streets ahead of most NATO armies in understanding its practical application.

Had Ukraine received the military support it requested earlier and in greater quantity, there is little doubt that Putin would now be in a far weaker position and considerably more enthusiastic about genuine peace negotiations. That lesson should not be lost on Britain. Defence cannot once again become the sacrificial lamb of domestic political turmoil. At a time when global instability is increasing, any government distracted by internal political warfare risks placing the defence of the realm in jeopardy.

Recce-Strike itself is deceptively simple in concept but revolutionary in execution. It integrates surveillance, reconnaissance, and strike assets into a single digital ecosystem capable of identifying and destroying enemy targets within minutes, sometimes seconds. The aim is to collapse the traditional “kill chain” through the use of AI-assisted targeting, drones, sensors, electronic warfare, and long-range precision firing.

The concept comprises three principal components. First, rapid targeting, drastically reducing the time between detection and destruction through AI-enabled decision making. Second, persistent battlefield surveillance using drones, sensors and electronic warfare to create a comprehensive picture of the battlespace. This is precisely where the much-maligned Ajax reconnaissance vehicle becomes absolutely critical. Critics have spent years deriding Ajax, but they fundamentally misunderstand its role. It is not merely a reconnaissance platform; it is the digital nerve centre of the future battlefield. Third comes long-range firing, combining intelligence and precision strike through artillery, missiles, and loitering munitions to hit enemy formations deep behind the front line.

The announcement that Britain will acquire 72 new self-propelled 155mm howitzers is highly significant. Mounted on the Boxer chassis, the RCH 155 represents exactly the sort of long-range precision capability Britain desperately needs. The systems will be manufactured in the United Kingdom under a contract valued at just under £1bn, strategically vital at a time when sovereign industrial resilience matters more than ever. The remotely or manually operated howitzer can fire eight rounds per minute at targets up to 70 kilometres away and can even operate unmanned when required.

Together with Ajax and Challenger 3, Britain is beginning to assemble the foundations of a genuinely modern, digitally integrated land force. Challenger 3, in particular, will be the Army’s first truly digital main battle tank and a formidable asset if fielded correctly. Combined, these systems could provide the British Army with a highly credible Recce-Strike capability suitable for surviving and winning on tomorrow’s battlefield.

However, time is not our side. The current ambition to have these capabilities fully operational by the end of the decade may simply be too slow given the pace of global instability and military innovation. There is no doubt that integrating Ajax, RCH 155, and Challenger 3 into a coherent fighting force presents enormous challengers in training, logistics, and doctrine. Nonetheless, these are solvable problems, provided the Treasury delivers sustained funding and political leaders maintain focus.

That, ultimately, is the key issue. Defence requires long-term national resolve, not short-term political calculation. The danger is that political chaos in Westminster, and any further lurch to the Left should Sir Keir Starmer lose his grip on Labour, could once again see defence spending sacrificed in favour of ever-expanding socialist commitments.

Today, Russia remains aggressive, China increasingly assertive, and conflict in the Middle East continues to destabilise the international order. Against such a backdrop, weakening defence spending would not simply be irresponsible. It would be reckless.

Without national security, every area of public spending is meaningless. If Britain cannot defend itself, debates over welfare and health budgets rapidly become academic. History repeatedly teaches us that freedom, prosperity, and stability are only preserved when nations possess the will and the capability to defend them.

– Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon’s next book ‘Tank Command’, to be released on June 4, is published by Headline, 320pp

His previous memoir, Chemical Warrior, was published in 2021. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon is a world-leading expert on chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons

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