Book review: This Must Be the Place by Maggie O’Farrell: another gem from the master storyteller

Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel This Must Be the Place is an absolute delight, the kind of book that makes reading that most self-indulgent and intoxicating of pleasures.

At its heart it’s a story of a marriage and a search for home – or, to be more precise, the stories, plural, of a married couple, Daniel Sullivan and Claudette Wells, as their lives weave in and out of each other’s orbits; tales that are complex and messy enough to warrant the impressive multitude of shifting perspectives, time periods and locations O’Farrell employs in order to do their lives and relationships (with each other and others) justice.

The novel opens in rural Donegal in 2010 when an unexpected blast from the past sends Daniel into emotional disarray. He quickly spirals into an extended trip down memory lane, healing some old wounds but also ripping open fresh ones. Neither Daniel – perfectly summed up by his son Niall as “both hero and demon of his life” – nor Claudette is perfect: in fact, if anything it’s their flaws that unite them, not least because both are experts at running away and hiding when the going gets tough. Daniel has an ex-wife and two children in California he hasn’t seen in 10 years, while Claudette, one-time world-famous film star, pulled off the coup of the century when she managed to seemingly vanish off the face of the earth.

Technically, the action spans 70-odd years, though the bulk takes place between the 1990s and the present day. It’s a structure that could be disastrous in hands less dexterous, but O’Farrell weaves a strongly cohesive whole out of a series of chapters, each of which is its own masterclass in world-building, a skill that’s mirrored in the detail with which she invests the creation of even the most minor of secondary characters. Whether an ageing British diplomat’s wife recently separated from her husband on the adventure of a lifetime in the mountains of Bolivia, a Brooklyn housewife who missed out on true love, or a lonely secondary school Media Studies teacher who’s never lived up to the potential of his academically impressive youth, somehow each is as three-dimensional as her star players, even if they’re only on stage for a single scene.

Put simply, O’Farrell’s virtuosity lies in the fact that she’s a master storyteller – so much so that one immediately forgives her the rare false step – children who seem inordinately tolerant of their parents inadequacies, who don’t demand attention (though often it’s much-needed) through teenage tantrums or talk of traumatic childhoods; the quirky inclusion of a chapter told entirely through objects, lots in an auction catalogue, the descriptions and annotations of which tell of a key episode in Claudette’s life; or one full of oddly chosen footnotes, newly discovered and eagerly employed by a 12-year-old Niall.

This Must Be the Place will have you still wide-awake when everyone else is asleep, simply because you can’t bear to put it down.

‘This Must Be the Place’ by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press, £18.99)