Maggie O’Farrell: ‘Fiction comes from the unknown’ | Fiction

EThe family has its own legends. In the mine, we were told that one of the people we met had worked on the first map of Ireland. As a child, I used to picture a solitary figure in an indistinct garment – a tailcoat, perhaps some kind of cravat – trudging through fields and hills, pen in hand. During the summer holidays, I look out of the window of our red van as Donegal or Galway drive past and marvel that such a feat is possible. How did one man begin to draw a map of the whole country, of these towns and ropes and trees and rivers?

All myths have many embellishments that run different threads of truth: time and repetition are always at odds with reality. This map captured my imagination. I thought of him, all the time, when I traveled around Ireland. I thought of him in my last year of school, when my geography exam required me to study a large part of an obscure map. I wanted, as I often do, to know more, about his life, his work, who he was and how he painted.

It took me a long time to find him. What happened was this: a family member died and my parents were sent some things related to the family. Among them was a hand-drawn map of an imaginary place, no more than an old hardback book, beautifully written in multi-colored ink. Also, an old picture of a man sitting at home with a child kneeling. There were no tailcoats or skins: this man was wearing a worn jacket and a low hat, behind him was a small stone house with a half-barred door. The child was looking at the artist with attentive and curious eyes.

Bano baali, mape and his son, it’s my greatness, my greatness, my greatness is in the knees. When I went back to look at the map with a magnifying glass, I could see, in the upper left corner, inside a small medallion, which must have been painted with a small brush, an interesting table. A soldier in a red jacket was leaning to look into a theodolite mounted on a tripod; Behind him, holding a measuring chain, stood a man he immediately recognized as the mapmaker in the picture.

There was the same faded jacket, the flipped hat, the beard, the stiffness of the stance. Here he had been hidden for more than 150 years. This invisible but loaded political statement struck me: the confidence, the confidence of the British soldier; the closeness and familiar anxiety of his great-grandfather behind him. So I went looking for anything else I could find.

Finding him in the written records was difficult because of the ruling that Irish Ordnance Survey staff were not allowed to sign their own work: all survey documents and maps had to be authenticated and signed by a British military officer. I went through the Ordnance Survey’s huge archive in Dublin and found interesting documents such as spelling advice and a letter from a woman in Cavan who complained about the soldiers destroying a bed. Order that all “employees” be identified by the English translation of their names. After the reminder that “All workers should be allowed one week off”, there was a list of signatures, including my grandfather’s. His name jumped out onto the page: a pen in italics, unlike mine, written in a sure and crooked hand.

It’s hard to explain when I discovered this. I would have clapped and cheered if it hadn’t been for the silence of the museum. Here he was and here it was: irrefutable evidence, black and white, of the truth of what we were told as children. I wanted to turn to my fellow archivists and say, you’ll never guess, just look at this.

However, when I read it a second time, it was not impossible to realize that the letter was dated June 1853. Even a person with a deep knowledge of history will know that Ireland suffered from a terrible famine in the middle of the 1800s. Between 1846 and 1852, more than a million people died of starvation or famine-related diseases; another million were forced to migrate, many of them ended up at sea; it is worth noting that these numbers are viewed by historians as a rough approximation.

This memorandum indicated that my great-grandfather was accompanying Ordnance Survey mapping teams, acting as laborers and interpreters, in the reconstruction after the accident. They would have been passing through a country that was destroyed and destroyed: about 30% of the population was lost, entire villages were destroyed, many graves along the roads, areas and fields were rebuilt, the political crisis was unprecedented. It would be his job to ensure that these terrible changes were recorded on the new post-famine map of Ireland. What could that be? How could a person who lived at that time be able to do this job?

I’ve always been against the rule, often broadcast in writing classes, that you should write what you know. The world is about a man, Tomás, and his family, trying to get out of the long shadow of hunger; it also tells the whole story of Ireland through a few places and all the people who lived there.

For me, fiction comes from what you don’t know, from – in this case – many things about Irish history, especially in the 19th century, that confused me, that filled me with questions. Foremost among these questions was how such a great tragedy was allowed to happen near the capital of the world’s richest empires. The world, then, came from a confused and angry imagination, inspired by the information I knew about my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- how when it came to the world – and hand-drawn maps, photographs, and legends that turned out to contain more truth than we thought.