In the small hours of the morning, film star Claudette Welles took her young son Ari, got into a rowboat and disappeared, leaving behind her lover, Swedish filmmaker Timou, and an unfinished film. Some years later, in the Irish countryside, linguistics academic Daniel Sullivan stumbles across her, and, abandoning his wife and children in the US, stays, building a life in a collapsing house in the middle of nowhere. Setting out for America when his father takes a bad turn back in Brooklyn, Daniel hears news of an old girlfriend’s death, some thirty years earlier, and alters his plans, sending him to England for answers, and placing his entire life in Ireland in jeopardy.
Things are, of course, a little bit more complicated than that (when aren’t they?) but Maggie O’Farrell as a writer is very well equipped to deal with such complications. This Must Be The Place is a story that begins and ends with Daniel and Claudette in their Irish hideaway, but moves between years and different narrative voices as it unfolds, building a picture of the couple through their own eyes and the eyes of those around them – look out in particular for a catalogue of Claudette’s belongings, sold off at auction, and for the transcription of an interview with Timou, now living as reclusively as his former lover.
What emerges is a story of a marriage that’s every bit as quirky and mysterious as Claudette, and as frustrating and dark as Daniel can be.
O’Farrell does a remarkable job of leaping from character to character, from time and place to time a place. Recently graduated Claudette in early 90s London gives way to recently divorced Rosalind in present day Bolivia with the greatest of ease, and no confusion for the reader. In particular, these moments away from Daniel and Claudette are those in which O’Farrell really shines, with her ability to craft quite brilliant characters coming to the fore. Whether it’s Niall, Daniel’s eczema ridden son who appears again and again throughout the story, often accompanied by an army of footnotes, or Timou’s assistant Lenny, who has only a single encounter with Claudette, everyone is given their dues, and has the space to evolve and become a full character. They all serve a purpose of course – the moments of piognancy O’Farrell extracts from people’s lives are all part of the saga of Daniel and Claudette – but they’re never entirely lost to the grand framing narrative. They remain every bit as present as the main characters, and it’s testament to O’Farrell’s writing abilities that she can imbue these bystanders with enough life to let them do that.
If there’s one thing I struggled with as a reader, it was the character of Daniel. While I grew to love Claudette, with her reclusive nature, her curious clothes, and her strange quirks, I never found myself warming to Daniel, or seeing why it was that so many brilliant women seemed to throw themselves at them. I wouldn’t dare say that you have to like your protagonist (far from it!) but when the focus of a narrative is essentially a love story, generally one does want to be able to root for the characters to be together. I wasn’t exactly throwing myself (and the book) around the room, lamenting Claudette’s decision (case in point: Ginny Weasley and Harry Potter. Really Ginny, REALLY?), but I certainly couldn’t see Daniel’s appeal, and that did make certain parts of the book a little hard to swallow.
This may of course be intentional, something I’ve come to believe from looking over reviews of and excerpts from O’Farrell’s other work. She specialises in the dysfunctional, the estranged, the emotionally absent, the problematic, though entirely realistic; perhaps we’re not meant to like Daniel, perhaps we’re meant to feel that mistakes are being made. No happy ending is quite so straight forward as we’d like, after all.
In This Must Be The Place, Maggie O’Farrell presents a pretty incredible, richly detailed portrait of a life together. Told in her unconventional way, it recognises all the strange parts of a person that makes them whole, and defines who they are. Equal parts experimental and emotional, it runs the full gamut from devastating to downright frustrating, with a surprising amount of humour packed into the pages too. An excellent read, and one that may well lead this reader further into O’Farrell territory!
This Must Be The Place is Maggie O’Farrell’s seventh novel. It is published by Tinder Press and is available now in Hardcover and e-book formats. To get your hands on a copy, and for more information on O’Farrell and her work, please see her website.
Reviewer received a copy of this book from Tinder Press in exchange for review.
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