Tinder Press, 2022, 446 p.

In the novel’s first paragraph Lucrezia de’ Medici – married to Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, for less than a year – realises that her husband intends to kill her. Forthcoming chapters relating her time at the retreat called Fortezza, near Bondeno, to which Alfonso has taken her, presumably for this sinister purpose, are in the same present tense as this one is. These are interspersed with past tense chapters unfolding the tale of her life up to that point as the third daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Duke of Tuscany.

The second chapter begins, “In the years to come, Eleonora would come to bitterly regret the manner in which her fifth child was conceived.” This, of course, brings immediate echoes of Gabriel García Márquez.  Here, though, such a proleptic pronouncement is perhaps more justified since it is not about this story’s future but describing its past. Eleonora’s misgivings are of course borne out since Lucrezia grows up an unusual child, aloof from her siblings. She was drawn to a tigress brought to her father’s menagerie and touched its fur without consequence, she has a great skill in drawing and painting, most of which has to be hidden from those around her – especially her ultra-conventional husband. Her best paintings are only for her own satisfaction, later used as palimpsests for images more acceptable to the wider world.

Alfonso d’Este had originally been betrothed to Lucrezia’s elder sister, Maria, but she unfortunately died. The alliance between the houses of Tuscany and Ferrara then fell on Lucrezia’s shoulders – at the age of thirteen. In the novel Lucrezia is against this even at her marriage’s eve. At its first mooting, her nurse, Sofia, conspires to pretend that she is not yet child-bearing by concealing any evidence of menstruation. Such prevarications had to end of course and Lucrezia is finally wed – to a man she had seen only once before and who turns out to be cruel and vindictive, and since his dynasty rests on shaky foundations, interested only in the provision of an heir.

As a young ingénue, Lucrezia’s ignorance of the politics of the Ferrarese court is exacerbated by Alfonso’s secretiveness about them. His mother had turned Protestant and thus a source of considerable embarrassment, before she fled abroad. His sisters Elisabetta and Nunciata make some efforts to befriend Lucrezia but are in thrall to Alfonso as well as in his power. The example Alfonso makes of Elisabetta’s presumed lover and besmircher of her honour, Ercole Contrari, is gruesome but illuminative of character. And brings home to  Lucrezia her powerlessness in her new role.

The marriage portrait of the title (apart from the depiction the novel gives us of the marriage of Lucrezia and Alfonso) has been commissioned by Alfonso from the famed Il Bastianino, who sends his pupils Jacopo and Maurizzio to make preliminary sketches. Lucrezia saves Jacopo’s life by administering milk and honey when she comes upon him comatose in a corridor in the aftermath of a fit of some kind. An immediate connection forms between them. This fateful association provides the lever for the novel’s resolution (in which O’Farrell permits herself to embellish the historical record.)

To modern Western eyes the sacrifice of a young girl on the altar of political or family alliances for dynastic purposes is objectionable. However the practice was unquestioned in historical times and is even yet widespread in other parts of the world. Humans still have a lot of progress to make in the matter of recognising the worth of one half of the species. Then again power corrupts. To be a male underling during the Italian renaissance was also to be (relatively) powerless, as an incident between Alfonso’s right hand man, Baldassare, and a servant illustrates.

While not quite reaching the heights of O’Farrell’s previous novel Hamnet, this is good, readable stuff. She conjures up the society of renaissance Italy well and puts us into the mind of an idiosyncratic young girl not yet fully wise to the ways of her world and shows how it changes her.

Pedant’s corner:- “into narrow streets of the city” (into the narrow streets.) “All is not lost” (Not all is lost,) mink (Lucrezia thinks of this as a comparison to a stone marten in a painting. The European mink’s range did not include Italy but that does not necessarily exclude it from her knowledge,) Hercules’ (Hercules’s,) Zeus’ (Zeus’s.) “‘Did you mother not teach you…’” (your mother,) burglarising (I growled at this. The verb is burgle, not burglarise, the participle required here is burgling.)

Tinder Press, 2020, 384 p.

Is there anyone who reads who does not know that Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet, who died as a boy, a name immortalised a few years later in the play titled Hamlet? This is not a spoiler in any case as in a short preface O’Farrell tells us as much, and that Hamnet and Hamlet were the same name, entirely interchangeable in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

In its writing this novel has echoes of Wolf Hall, whether that be because of the Tudor setting, or that Hamnet’s grandfather is quick with his fists, or a kind of linguistic obscurantism. In Hilary Mantel’s novel Thomas Cromwell was often denoted cryptically as “he,” Here characters are sometimes described simply as “a boy” or “a woman” and Hamnet’s father is never referred to by name, only as, variously, “the Latin Tutor,” “the husband,” or “the father.”

This distancing is quite deliberate on O’Farrell’s part as the novel’s focus is not on the son, (who dies two thirds of the way in anyway,) nor indeed is it on the husband and father. This is the story of the wife and mother, Agnes, pronounced Ann’yes and so liable to be misheard as Anne. It is a beautiful piece of imagining on O’Farrell’s part, evoking life in Tudor England utterly convincingly, illustrating the fluctuating balances of power within families, rescuing Agnes from the sidelines of history, revealing her as a vibrant, complex character in her own right. In it she also manages to provide a better explanation than the usual one for the playwright’s famous bequest – as an act of love.

In part I the chapters mostly alternate between the goings-on in Henley Street, Stratford, in the run-up to Hamnet contracting his fatal illness (where there is actually a fair degree of attention paid to Hamnet,) and the earlier life of his mother and father, how they met, got together, married and had three children. Despite Agnes having the gift of (second) sight, Hamnet’s twin Judith comes as a surprise, is then given up for dead on arrival after him, but subject to Agnes’s frantic efforts to keep her alive and her constant worry thereafter. Agnes is also a dispenser of herbal remedies. There is a passage written from the point of view of a hooded kestrel in an apple store which is quite beautifully done and also a diversionary chapter on the mechanism of how Hamnet may have caught bubonic plague, beginning with a flea in Alexandria, the plague bacillus eventually transferring to England via a glassmaker in Venice. Though never emphasised as such, interplay between the characters suggest the seeds for what was to come in the plays. Part II by contrast deals with the aftermath of Hamnet’s death and its chapters follow the story linearly. Grief is a difficult sense to communicate in fiction but we see its expression in all of the family and feel it through them.

Use of the present tense can be alienating but O’Farrell’s deployment of the device is superb, keeping the action contingent, reminding us that to the characters the events she shows us were happening in the here and now, there was still the possibility of an alternative outcome. It brilliantly conveys Hamnet’s distracted state of mind as he scurries about the empty house (usually so full of people) seeking help when his twin falls ill. O’Farrell is tremendous too on Agnes’s experience of childbirth. I doubt a man could ever have transmitted the sensations, feelings and worries so effectively. Throughout, the author is totally in control and the final scenes, as Agnes hurries off to London to ask her husband why he dared to use his dead son’s name in a play, are magnificent. The play, after all, has kept that name alive.

Hamnet is a wonderful novel. How it was left off the Booker Prize long- and shortlist last year is beyond me. It did, though, win the Women’s Fiction Prize and the Dalkey Literary Awards and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize.

Pedant’s corner:- epicentre (used, wrongly, in the sense of absolute centre,) “the dark maw of the ground” (it was the opening of a grave; not a stomach, then, therefore not a maw,) stoved in (stove in, or, staved in,) “that all is not as it should be” (that not all is as it should be.) “She sits up nights” (she sits up at night,) hoofs (in my youth the plural was always ‘hooves’.)