Shared geography


It struck home the other day that we all have our own personal geography. Not so much mapped roads, forests or contour lines, more like memories and emotions attached to particular places and times. It’s probably a sign of middle age that I’d love to find the time to return to the town where I spent the first eighteen years of my life and waste a couple of days exploring and reminiscing. In a philosophical way, I wonder if I’d find a younger, more innocent me hidden amongst the alleys, streets and houses of my youth.

That’s my history – my geography. Others have starring roles and bit parts, sliding in and out of my story, appearing on my horizon and then receding – but essentially, it’s mine. There are other places that most of us share in one way or another. Famed through film, music and literature, we all have an idea about places that many of us will probably never visit. If we were to play word association with place names, I don’t doubt that there would be at least some common ideas we all have for the same place.

This train of thought came about due to a couple of books I’ve read recently. Both books, partly set in London, draw on a common knowledge and emotional heritage that most British people share. I suppose most will have visited the usual places that tourists do in London. Some will have ventured further a field. Our knowledge and connection to the capital goes a little further though.

I’ve got the latest version of Harry Beck’s schematic diagram of the London Underground in front of me. While I’ve not visited the majority of places named, they all have some resonance. The names alone have that oddly calming tone of the fishing forecast. Many others fire sleeping mental synapses. I can’t hear the words Ealing Broadway without thinking about 1950s black and white movies starring David Niven and Terry Thomas; St John’s Wood, cricket; Canary Wharf, money. Other names could populate a Dickens novel: Cockfosters, Mudshute, Gunnersbury. And then there’s the names of the suburbs, the parks, the monuments. It goes on and on. London has as rich a geography as any city in the world and it’s one we all share, to one degree or another.

If you were writing a short story and placed your character at Piccadilly Circus during rush hour, you have an immediate sense of scale. Your character is alone among many thousands of cars and pedestrians. Put him outside a public toilet on Hampstead Heath at dusk and you have something else. The references are already there. As a writer you’d have to work less hard for them than if you placed them somewhere in Chesterfield or Northampton.

I have a great admiration for novelists who create their own geography as part of a narrative device. Thomas Hardy is famous for adapting his part of the world to shape his tales within. Pulitzer Prize-winning Richard Russo created a wonderful mid-American town in Empire Falls. The list is enormous and I’m sure everyone will have their favourites. The skill of these authors is to build a physical and emotional geography without overtly creating it for the reader. The landmarks and histories are a part of the narrative and characters.

London, it could be argued, has the poetry of centuries and layers of history, real and literary, that make up its physical and emotional landscape. Authors can draw on that to enrich their writing. Other less famous places, or indeed imagined, rely on the skill of the writer to build resonances and meaning into what for the reader, were previously meaningless locations.

All this leads back to where I started. We all have memories and emotions linked to time and place. It’s something a reader can identify with in a well rounded character. Perhaps it’s not the place at all – just the links that are important.