Stylistically, narratively and emotionally, This Must Be the Place is a tour de force, a complex and nuanced story leaping effortlessly across multiple characters, continents and time frames. And yet, at its heart, it is a story about people who are lost and about their troubled, flawed, deeply affecting attempts to reconnect with the people they love and the world around them ... The epicentre of the novel is a portrait of a marriage, so deftly painted by O’Farrell that the experience of reading it is, at times, quite devastating ... A rich cast of secondary characters populate the narrative, each chapter being told from a different point of view, and it is testament to the distinctiveness of the voices O’Farrell creates that she is able to move the reader seamlessly between them ... technically dazzling and deeply moving.
This Must Be the Place matches its predecessors for sheer reading pleasure and engagement ... O’Farrell expertly unravels the tangled threads that lead her protagonists to a wrenching confrontation that quite probably will destroy their marriage. This possibility is all the more painful because she has surrounded them with a richly colored supporting cast that would also suffer ... underscore[s] O’Farrell’s principal theme: the struggle to locate our true selves amid the disorderly mess of our lives.
The result, though not without its fault lines, is marvelous, a contemporary and highly readable experiment whose ambitious structure both enacts and illuminates its central concern: what links and separates our 21st-century selves as we love, betray, blunder and soldier on (and back) through time ... Some jumps didn’t entirely convince me. O’Farrell generally does an admirable job portraying people of different ages, genders, backgrounds and sensibilities from both sides of the Atlantic, but sometimes her supporting characters take up too much space or don’t feel sufficiently grounded in their own particularities ... O’Farrell lands us powerfully inside these charged meeting points, only to shatter them — and land, and shatter, and land again.
O’Farrell’s seemingly effortless ability to give the mundane a metaphorical lift remains as sharp as ever ... That the novel should be so fully persuasive is down to O’Farrell’s recurrent theme – which is not so much how a person can unaccountably go missing as how swiftly and silently love may slip out of a relationship ... It is O’Farrell’s ability to recognise such moments, when they inevitably come, that makes her such a deft and compelling chronicler of human relationships.
The entire experiment with perspective is presided over by a disembodied, clairvoyant docent who tips us to future plot developments as well as to those which take place off the page. In the end, the facts, when finally assembled, of Daniel’s guilty secret are not especially convincing ... [Farrell's] writing conveys as vivid a sense of the place as it has in the past. But unlike her last couple of books, fine novels about completely believable people with credible secrets, sorrows, and vexed relationships, the present work has a desperate scrabbling quality and is not at all worthy of this writer’s talent.
...an intensely absorbing saga about two flawed yet deeply sympathetic people haunted by past missteps, which eventually threaten to destroy their present ... even when O'Farrell flexes her authorial omniscience to tip us off about what will happen, we read avidly to discover the how and why — which she tends to reveal obliquely, always showing and rarely telling ... O'Farrell does not coddle her readers; she's not afraid to baffle us with the introduction of new characters late in her novel. Nor is she afraid to flirt with sentimentality by featuring some of the best parents and closest, most supportive siblings in recent literature.
O'Farrell succeeds brilliantly with the novel's experimental form. Vignettes, focusing on a different time and place, and each told from a different point of view, combine for a nuanced, compelling narrative ... Reading between the lines, we cannot help discerning some sympathy for Daniel on the part of O'Farrell. She has succeeded in creating a larger-than-life main character.
The story is told not chronologically, but as a mosaic, in chapters that skip around in time (the book covers roughly 1940 to present day) and from multiple points of view, slowly revealing secrets that reverberate through the years and haunt the present … As with O'Farrell's earlier novels, This Must Be the Place is seamlessly written and engrossing. And as with her earlier books, it is also is shot through with wisdom about families, relationships, forgiveness and love.
