Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > Hamnet > Status Update

‘“No, the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child. I see this,” she says to him, as he binds her wrists together with one of his hands, reaching down for the bag at his feet with the other.’

‘The sound that comes out of him is choked and smothered, like that of an animal forced to bear a great weight. It is a noise of disbelief, of anguish. Agnes will never forget it. At the end of her life, when her husband has been dead for years, she will still be able to summon its exact pitch and timbre.’

‘Neither he nor his wife, as they sit in the room with their tiny babies, knows that this plan will never come off. She will never bring the children to join him in London. He will never buy a house there.’

I always wondered why that was, from what we can tell he seemed to love Anne/Agnes, so why stay away so long? Why not move them to London?

‘She sees the cloud above him grow darker, gather its horrible rank strength... How easy it is, Agnes thinks, as she lifts the plages, to miss the pain and anguish of one person, if that person keeps quiet, if he keeps it all in, like a bottle stoppered too tightly, the pressure inside building and building, until - what?’

“Madam,” the physician says, and again his beak swings towards them, “you may trust that I know much more about these matters than you do. A dried toad, applied to the abdomen for several days, has proven to have great efficacy in cases such as these. If your daughter is suffering from the pestilence, I regret to say that there is very little that may-“

‘What she has always dreaded is here. It has come. The moment she has feared most, the event she has thought about, mulled over, turned this way and that, rehearsed and re-rehearsed in her mind, during the dark of sleepless nights, at moments of idleness, when she is alone. The pestilence has reached her house. It has made its mark around her child’s neck.’

The Waterstones exclusive edition, which doesn’t seem to be on here, but includes a great section at the back about where they lived, including the author’s drawings of the floor plans, pictures etc.