A delightful and well-illustrated tour around places made famous in literature. Where do I book my ticket?
Sarah Baxter is an author, journalist and deputy editor of the UK Sunday Times. She has written extensively on travel including for Lonely Planet Guides, Australian Geographic and this new book in the Inspired Traveller’s Guide series.
As she points out in the introduction, novelists create whole worlds in their books whether in the past, a fantasy future or in what we might recognise as the present. And in those worlds, the location can sometimes have as big a role in the story as do the characters. Paring down the list to just 25 literary locations must have been an arduous task.
I just love the illustrations by Amy Grimes, they are so much better than photographs. The rich descriptions are beautifully rendered by Grimes in appropriate atmospheric colours: greys, purple and blues for the Yorkshire Moors; and the rich orange and red of Hanging Rock as it pierces up through the surrounding countryside against a very sombre blue, almost black backdrop. The latter reminds us of the disappearance of the original dwellers, long before the school girls had a picnic there.
Would Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights have the same chilling impact if it had not been set on the Yorkshire Moors? The bleak, forbidding and mysterious moors – home to hidden marshes, windswept heather and rocky crags which are the ideal setting for ‘a strange, savage tale of love and revenge’ (page 78). Brontë was, as writers are often advised to do, writing about what she knew. Her home village of Haworth, on the edge of the moors, was as a cloth town increasingly caught up in the industrialisation of the trade and she used the moors as both escape and inspiration.
In a bare two or three pages, Baxter encapsulates the essence of the place she is writing about. Chapters often begin with a comment on the weather then engagingly describe the literary place. In Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) as visited by Thomas Fowler, in Graeme Green’s The Quiet American,much of what was in the novel is no longer there but I would still like to see for myself even if the milk bars have been replaced by fast food joints. We can join Greene himself and stay in the 1880 Hotel Continental or head to the roof top bar of the Majestic and enjoy a cocktail as the sun goes just down as Fowler did.
It’s a clever narrative device which works because Baxter is such an accomplished travel writer and can evoke the very essence of these places through her descriptions, ably assisted by Grimes’ great illustrations and maps. Her narrative works particularly well when she takes us on a trip through the landscape of the novel – such as in Bloom’s Dublin from James Joyce’s Ulysses or Raskolnikov’s St Petersburg from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Reviewed by Jan Kershaw
Distributed by: Murdoch Books
Released: March 2019
RRP: $29.99 hardcover
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