I'm very sympathetic to the idea that all the best fiction has a map at
the front, but I'm not a complete convert. Different maps serve
different puposes: the map in The Hobbit is a call to adventure, while the maps of the Hundred Acre Wood or Moominvalley
are more like welcoming gifts. Both types are pretty scant on detail, and
both are types I like: maps you don't have to constantly refer to. It's
not just laziness that makes me favour these maps, it's that they
make no serious attempt to pretend – as some fantasies do – that
imagined lands can be depicted objectively.
It was Nerdwriter's video below that got me thinking about this (that, and the
fact I just finished "A Wizard of Earthsea" but I'll write about that
map tomorrow).
According to Nerdwriter the "bill of goods" of a fantasy is not
World-Building, but "the ideas and insights that spring forth from the
explosive act of reading":
Or to quote M. John Harrison on his own imagined world:
I was delighted to see Harrison's name pop up. I've always loved "In Viriconium" – there's a detectable Viriconian influence here
for example. Like Bastian's Fantasia in "The Neverending Story" the
city is unmappable. In my spare periods at school, I used to walk along
the then undeveloped South Bank in the shadow of Bankside Power Station
(now Tate Britain) looking for places Viriconium might be, scouting liminal
locations. And any reader in any other city could do the same.
That's one of the reasons I love Orson Welles' film of "The Trial", whence all these images (more here).
Unable to shoot in Prague, he had to invent his own dream city from
bits of Paris, Milan, Rome, Dubrovnik and Zagreb – effectively shooting
the film in Viriconium. Terry Gilliam's own stab at Kafka a couple of decades
later, "Brazil",
would conjure a similar city out of real locations; its setting, according to the opening title – "somewhere in the twentieth century" – similarly
vague.
So that's why I'm not a-hundred-per-cent a fan of maps at the beginning
of books. Fantasy locations are unvisitable. Definitive visualisations are
impossible. That said...
I can't have been the only child to think Tolkein was taking
the piss with his illustations to "The Hobbit". Show us the bloody
monsters.
"Like all books, Viriconuim is just some words. There is no place, no society, no dependable furniture to 'make real'. You can't read it for that stuff, so you have to read it for everything else."
Some places it's a great idea, others not so much. For instance, mapping Gormenghast Castle would be a complete disaster, and to my knowledge nobody's tried, fortunately. Generally I love a map, and (referring to your Earthsea post) I liked that map too, but your point is a good one.
ReplyDeleteThing is (*heresy alert*) His maps were good but I don't think Tolkien was much of an illustrator. Things like the door into Moria and the forest above are ok, as they're mostly done with a ruler, and his watercolours and landscapes are gorgeous, but when it comes to drawing living beings, not so great.
There's something nicely Hobbity about Tolkein's illustations though, amateurish and determinedly uncontroversial. Growing up with Tolkein there were no shortage of visualisations of his work from other artists of course, and seeking out that huge, mad variety of visions was a huge pleasure of my childhood so I'm glad he offered nothing definitive.
ReplyDeleteI'll admit I'm the kind of person who once bought a (completely redundant, but in the same way Brian Froud and Alan Lee's Faeries is an inessential item to possess) Atlas of Middle Earth. (I absolutely draw the line at all the madness about inventing several different languages from scratch, though - to the point of Tolkien claiming, in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, that the Hobbits' names as used in the narration are actually translations from whatever the Hobbit language is called.)
ReplyDeleteStill, I think Middle Earth is wide enough that the map at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings is more of a helpful outline than a constriction imposed upon imagination. At least, that's how it felt to me as I followed the characters slowly trudging their way through forests and wastelands, down tunnels and up mountains - which looked so close on the map, yet took so many days of labour for them to get through. (But also, I'm the kind of idiot who totally didn't realise that the oliphaunts were basically just elephants, so maybe that's why I needed a detailed map in the first place.)
On the point of enjoying the unvisitable - I never really thought about it before, but I guess to me it's a case of there being (at least) two different kind of stories/narrations: those that benefit from overly detailed world-building and neatly drawn maps, and those that draw their strength from labyrinthine and/or unpredictable worldscapes. (I'm thinking of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino for the latter, and I'm not saying everyone should read Calvino's Invisible Cities, but also, most of the cities from that book can be found on Colleen Corradi Brannigan's website, along with the artist's rendition of those same cities).
Last but not least, I just finished reading May's Account of August, and I absolutely loved it. Very Calvino/Borges-adjacent, at least to my ear - but then again, I'm probably wrong, as is to be expected. Still. The thread, the shoes, the napkins. Heavens. So mind-spinningly good.
Thanks ever! Nerdwritre1 (I should find out his actual name) is good enough to credit Tolkein with making good on the bill of sale, in spite of the apocrypha. More troubling maybe is the entirely visitable Lego Playstation Lord of the Rings Middle Earth, troubling only because of how much time I spent there.
ReplyDelete