On Having A Map
Novels set in real places usually don't come with a map, even if the book is set in the past and the place in question has changed radically. It isn't that the setting isn't mappable. It's that it is, and so maps of it already exist, widely distributed out there in the real world of which the setting is a part. My novel Golden Hill, set in the tiny colonial town of New York in 1746, didn't have a map. There were decorative little map-like elements among the drawings that illustrated the book, but if you wanted to know how the streets connected up, and how the whole place looked, you needed to go and look at the Carwitham map of NYC in 1730, or the Maerschalck map of 1755 – the two maps I used in fact, in photocopy form, when I was writing the book. I had a secret reason for wanting to keep a map out, to do with the way I'd surreptitiously stretched the geography of Lower Manhattan to make my chase scenes last longer. But book tradition was on my side. On the whole realist novels don't have maps. There are exceptions – novels with complicated military campaigns in them; novels where people travel round the world – but mostly the rule holds good.
Where you do get a map, where indeed the map is proof positive of the genre you're reading, is in fantasy. Why? Because there the map can add something to the existence of a place that only exists in the pages of the story. A map of an imagined place says: this setting doesn't just exist, thread-wide, through the sequence of events the story tells. It has a simultaneous existence too, spread out, visitable. Look! Here are locations that the novel doesn't, as it happens, call at, and yet there they are, proving, proving I tell you, that a whole domain of imagined reality stretches beyond the margins of the narrative. A whole forest of possibility, rather than just the single path the novel follows through it. A fantasy map is a deceptive promise, an IOU backed by nothing but sheer assertion. Or maybe fairy gold.
And now, for the first time in my writing life, I've got one. Or two, in fact. At the front of every copy of Cahokia Jazz, there's a political map, showing the boundaries of the altered North America of the novel, the US states of Cahokia (CK) and Dinetah (DH) and Sequoyah (SQ), along with the independent Republic of Deseret and the New Siberian Territory, where Reds and Whites are fighting as part of the Russian Civil War in this version of 1922. And then after it, there's the thing I'm really proud of, a handy two-page street plan of the city of Cahokia itself. I can't post an image of it here, yet. But I promise you, and my promise is backed by the very highest-quality fairy gold, that it is a thing of beauty. More than that: a thing of (apparent) solidity. There are all the places that Detective Barrow goes in the book, and many he doesn't. The whole set of imaginary historical layers are there which I've added to the real layout of the Cahokia archaeological site. On top of the ancient geometry of plaza and mounds, a seventeenth century city of the kind the Jesuits created in real-life Paraguay. On top of that, the beaux-arts business district and railroads and canneries and streetcar lines of the early 20th century metropolis, loud with sirens, bells, car engines and occasional gunfire. Of course, given that the lowest historical layer is a real one, my Cahokia isn't a pure fantasy. It's a hybrid. But still the map declares: these streets are only to be walked, only to be run through, only to be traversed on the number 7 streetcar, in imagination.
And does the presence of the map mean that the novel behaves like a fantasy in other ways? In terms of what is possible within the kind of story it tells? I couldn't possibly comment...
Where you do get a map, where indeed the map is proof positive of the genre you're reading, is in fantasy. Why? Because there the map can add something to the existence of a place that only exists in the pages of the story. A map of an imagined place says: this setting doesn't just exist, thread-wide, through the sequence of events the story tells. It has a simultaneous existence too, spread out, visitable. Look! Here are locations that the novel doesn't, as it happens, call at, and yet there they are, proving, proving I tell you, that a whole domain of imagined reality stretches beyond the margins of the narrative. A whole forest of possibility, rather than just the single path the novel follows through it. A fantasy map is a deceptive promise, an IOU backed by nothing but sheer assertion. Or maybe fairy gold.
And now, for the first time in my writing life, I've got one. Or two, in fact. At the front of every copy of Cahokia Jazz, there's a political map, showing the boundaries of the altered North America of the novel, the US states of Cahokia (CK) and Dinetah (DH) and Sequoyah (SQ), along with the independent Republic of Deseret and the New Siberian Territory, where Reds and Whites are fighting as part of the Russian Civil War in this version of 1922. And then after it, there's the thing I'm really proud of, a handy two-page street plan of the city of Cahokia itself. I can't post an image of it here, yet. But I promise you, and my promise is backed by the very highest-quality fairy gold, that it is a thing of beauty. More than that: a thing of (apparent) solidity. There are all the places that Detective Barrow goes in the book, and many he doesn't. The whole set of imaginary historical layers are there which I've added to the real layout of the Cahokia archaeological site. On top of the ancient geometry of plaza and mounds, a seventeenth century city of the kind the Jesuits created in real-life Paraguay. On top of that, the beaux-arts business district and railroads and canneries and streetcar lines of the early 20th century metropolis, loud with sirens, bells, car engines and occasional gunfire. Of course, given that the lowest historical layer is a real one, my Cahokia isn't a pure fantasy. It's a hybrid. But still the map declares: these streets are only to be walked, only to be run through, only to be traversed on the number 7 streetcar, in imagination.
And does the presence of the map mean that the novel behaves like a fantasy in other ways? In terms of what is possible within the kind of story it tells? I couldn't possibly comment...
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