Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

On a summer’s day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?

Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London.

Neither parent knows that Hamnet will not survive the week.

Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright: a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.

This is one of the best books I have read recently and I can’t quite put my finger on exactly what makes it such a masterpiece.

The blurb on the back reveals the most important event of the book – Hamnet’s death – so, really, there are no spoilers. However, there is so much more to the book than this. Although Hamnet’s death is the centrepiece of the plot, the book explores the full range of emotions surrounding it: Agnes’ fierce love for her children, the bond between Hamnet and his sisters – particularly his twin, Judith – and the raw grief that follows his death.

Shakespeare’s name is left unsaid but it is assumed that the reader knows the context. In writing what is essentially historical fiction, Maggie O’Farrell has taken some artistic licence in piecing together the facts of Hamnet’s childhood and death based on limited sources, but it is plausible and (I thought) even likely that her historical assumptions are correct.

O’Farrell has the intangible skill of choosing the perfect language at every turn. She finds exactly the right words or combinations of words, and sets them out at exactly the right pace, to describe the acute emotions the characters experience. She is able at once to convey a sense of movement throughout the book whilst at the same time focusing almost entirely on the snapshot of Hamnet’s short life. This contrast between the moving and the static is a poignant reminder that life is not simply a series of events one after another; all of our choices and experiences are based on what we have experienced before, and there are some things we find impossible to relinquish, which inform our whole sense of identity going forwards.

It struck me that the emotional reactions to the events in Hamnet are universal. Despite being set more than four hundred years ago, would anybody today, anywhere in the world, have a different reaction to the death of their young son or brother?

And what is the link between one of Shakespeare’s most renowned plays and the boy Hamnet? In a fit of anger, Agnes travels to the Globe to find out in one of the last scenes of the book.

What is the word, Judith asks her mother, for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin?

If you were a wife, Judith continues, and your husband dies, then you are a widow. And if its parents die, a child becomes an orphan. But what is the word for what I am?

Maybe there isn’t one, she suggests.

Maybe not, says her mother.