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Literature, Novels

Novels’ Settings – Are They Important?

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I read a short essay by Andrea Camilleri on literary places (Realtà, invenzione e memoria dei luoghi letterari) which has really made me think about the settings of literary works and how important they are. It is fair to say that I did not fully understand Camilleri’s categorisations of different types of literary  places, but I have started to wonder what the link is between the meaning of the work and where it is set.

Obviously, this will depend entirely on the individual work. In some cases, it is a generic place at a vague time in the present. However, the place and time are specifically chosen or invented. Camilleri would say (I think) that there is a type of remodelling, even when one writes about a real place. Fantasy books must have a very strong sense of place, because a new world is being created. If it is not to be just a copy of an ordinary place with added centaurs or unicorns, there has to be a thoroughness in the development of the geography, culture, philosophy and religion of the world. I do love to see a map at the beginning of a book – it usually follows that I will like the contents! But a map is not enough to build a world. Philip Pullman succeeds in doing so in His Dark Materials, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter world likewise. Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, and many more, have made worlds so complete and beautiful we might even imagine ourselves there and long to live in them.

I imagine that some people do not like to have to work so hard to assimilate an imaginary world. But I believe all the worlds we read about are imaginary, even if they have their corresponding real places in our real world. Our own perspectives of our environment ensure that every author’s description of a place will be different, depending on their experiences, age, intentions and feelings. After I read Camilleri’s essay, I wrote a short piece of writing on the village of my childhood. It is a real place, populated by real people. But would anyone, even someone there in the 70s and 80s, recognise the place from my description? Would they agree that it is a good representation? But I wonder if that is the point. The description tells you more about me than about my village. And this is why the consideration of settings in novels is so important.

The author, intentionally or otherwise, has chosen a place for his characters to inhabit. This must, to some degree, tell us about his or her concerns and preoccupations, the things which drove them to write the book in the first place. We might imagine that the setting is simply something known to the author, but it becomes a unique place as soon as the author writes it down. That unique place tells us the perspective of the author, in big things and small.

So, Dickens’ London is a different place from Trollope’s or Thackeray’s, just as Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh is different from the place you can wander around on a Saturday afternoon. The names may be the same, the streets, the hotels, the churches; nevertheless, it is somewhere completely different. Can you imagine, for one moment, a megalosaurus waddling in the mud up Holborn Hill in the London of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes? The image, grotesque and, at the time, controversial, is purely Dickens. It is Dickens’ London we evoke in every picture of an English Christmas; we can almost live in its dark, sinister, winding streets, the squalid poverty of its slums, the places where the ordinary people live, from Tom All Alone’s to Bleeding Heart Yard. As much as we would like to believe that he described the real London around him, we can’t help but notice how far away it is from Trollope’s elegant drawing rooms and the contained practicality of Conan Doyle’s Baker Street.

This quotation I referred to earlier from the beginning of Bleak House is a place to start when thinking about this:

As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

If we look at the dinosaur wading through the mud up Holborn Hill, we see Dickens’ love of the outrageous, the exaggerated image of, what was then, a newly discovered and religiously controversial part of our history. That ancient history mixed with new Darwinian ideology, marching on the outmoded, damaging bureaucracy of Chancery Lane and the British justice system, while the men and women slipped and slid on the mud in the streets, splashed and dirty to the eyes, is a perfect image of the new and ancient quagmire that was the law. Holborn Hill is not, for Dickens, simply a real place in London, but is the approach to the seat of the Court of Chancery, (otherwise known as equity), dealing with the settlement of wills and business affairs, and known in the nineteenth century for the slow ruin it brought to all who were doomed to be involved in it.

So, it seems, a place is not just a place. For the author, it has a meaning beyond its name. That may be tangential or pivotal, but, as it had to be specifically chosen by the author, it has to hold some significance beyond its reference to a place in the real world. Whether the setting really exists or not, we always enter the place of the author’s imagination when we walk there with them.

Fiction

A Sense of Place

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I remember having an Italian pen pal when I was about twelve or thirteen; his name was Giuseppe. In one letter, he asked for a photograph of the place I lived and I was happy to send him one. In those days, when you took a photo, it came out well, or it didn’t, and you had no way of knowing until you bought the prints from Boots. This photo, taken on a misty day, essentially showed streetlights dimly shining in the gloom, fog covering everything, and an indistinct street disappearing into nothing. I don’t think it is a coincidence that he never wrote to me again.  I suppose what he saw was more or less a grey fog with floating street lamps and the grey tarmac of the road. What I had seen was a magic scene of mystery and fantasy which covered the everydayness of my normal world.

The village I grew up in was not pretty. The very word ‘village’ gives you the wrong impression. I don’t know what happy scenes of picturesque Englishness you have before your eyes, but banish them! The size of the settlement rather than its character is the only reason I chose the word ‘village’. Originally it had been a village and a colliery, separated by barely a mile of fields. The village had been a street of stone-built cottages opposite an imposing pub, and a further collection of houses around a cross-roads, with the vicarage standing austerely in front of a tree-covered paddock, and a tiny school of golden stone a few yards down the road.  The colliery, instead, was three rows of blackened brick terraces across the road from the mine. In my day, the two had become joined by a sprawling residential estate of reasonably priced houses, and the vicarage had been torn down to make way for twelve detached modern houses, one of which was my home.  The little main street had two shops in it when I was young: Bank Top Stores, a corner shop worthy of the name, and Barker’s, a tiny little sweetshop, where I spent any money I could find or was given.

I don’t know what I could have taken a photograph of for Giuseppe to give him a real feel for the mining village of my youth. The pub, perhaps, quite grand from the outside. I remember being sent to get my Dad and being allowed into the bar to speak to him – men only, smoke-filled, full of taciturn working men. Or perhaps the school, later a library, where I began my school life (smacked for colouring over the lines of a rabbit in my brown pencil) and continued as an avid reader at the library once the new school was built in the new estate. I could have shown him my 70s built house – large windows, neat lawn – or the fields at the back covered in nettles and dock leaves. I can’t imagine he would have been impressed by any of that.

To me, in my grey 70s childhood, Italy was a fantasy land of beauty and dreams. No one from there could be interested in my small, ordinary corner of the world.

I have lived in other places, but I came home twenty years ago – not to the village itself but to a prosperous market town nearby. But when I dream, I am often there, in that house, in that street. Whether I like it or not, that is the landscape inside my head. I wanted to soften its corners with the foggy picture I sent to an uncomprehending Italian boy, but it remains hard and real in my mind, more than the prettier scenes of my adult life.