By Megan Thomas
After reading Hamnet, I’m always on the lookout for Maggie O’Farrell’s novels, whether that’s on Book Bub’s (my favourite email subscription for ebook deals) or the shelves of charity shops – I have After You’d Gone on my TBR pile from a charity shop find, though A Marriage Portrait is vcery much on my radar. Anyway, enough about the books I haven’t read: This Must Be The Place… *chef’s kiss*
Whatever magical literary spell O’Farrell cast me under in Hamnet was equally powerful in This Must Be The Place, a saga which for the most part tracks the lives of protagonists Claudette Well, a film star who many assumed dead after her mysterious disappearance, and her husband Daniel Sullivan, whose life is significantly less high profile but almost as dramatic.
It strikes me while writing this review that if you were to ask me what the book is about, I’m not sure I’d be able to give you an answer. “Everything”, perhaps I’d say, “and nothing, all at once”. “Life”, maybe, although that seems obnoxiously vague. If a plot-driven novel is about the things that happen in chronological order in a person’s life, then This Must Be The Place is about the things that happen in between those plot points.
Leaping between timelines with total abandon (it took me a little while to get into the groove but once I did, there was no looking back), O’Farrell does what she does best: builds multiple, entire lives with surprisingly few words. The central narrative, the “now”, is the culmination of the various plot points, or experience, that the characters have experienced throughout their lives, from Daniel’s traumatic experience with an ex-girlfriend as well as the loss of custody of his children, to Claudette’s dreams of being a success in the film industry to the lonely and dissatisfying reality of it.
CHEF’S KISS, I TELL YA.
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One response to “This Must Be The Place”
[…] possible to read a Maggie O’Farrell novel and not cry. With that said, I’ve only read Hamnet, This Must Be The Place and now After You’d Gone – so perhaps it’s a coincidence. I’ll read her seven other […]
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