Hamnet

“Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry […] It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.” 

This passage from the opening sequence of the novel alludes to the event that will haunt Hamnet’s mother Agnes after he is gone: her absence at the time Hamnet searched for her. The depopulated nature of the spaces that Hamnet’s relatives usually occupy sets an ominous tone, and his loneliness at this time prefigures his state after death. The images of the hub and epicentre allude to the dark spaces of the womb and tomb where Hamnet begins and ends his life.

“No bee-keeper veil covers her face — she never wears one. If you came close enough, you would see that her lips are moving, murmuring small sounds and clicks to the insects that circle her head, alight on her sleeve, blunder into her face.” 

Written in the present tense, this passage creates an immediate and intimate portrayal of Agnes’s remarkably trusting relationship with nature. O’Farrell introduces a “you”—perhaps the reader—who would approach a bee-keeper with the expectation that she would wear a veil and be afraid of these stinging insects. On the contrary, Agnes trusts the bees and communicates with them using nonverbal sounds. The fact that an onlooker would have to come “close enough” to notice Agnes’s communion with the bees, indicates that she does not openly flaunt her powers.