THE YEAR IN REHASH: JANUARY - Why Not Build A World? (Enjoying the Unvisitable)

  Initiating a review of my favourite, or at least more conspicuous, posts from the last twelve months, here's the post from January I think about most – a nicely busy month, during which I started reviewing old Universal Frankenstein movies and got to be in Ghosts, but this is about maps and fantasy. Of course, the whole world would become a dreamscape later in the year, and M. John Harrison would win the Goldsmiths Prize. Reading Pratchett's "Going Postal" last month, I was reminded how similar even the stubborn unplaceability of Ankh-Morpok feels to Viriconium in its collision of Medieval, Imperial, Chivalric, and Industrial rotteness. As Terry Pratchett said: “You can't map a sense of humor."  So this is from January the 9th...

 

 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:

"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."

  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.