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Literary Travelogue 1/22/2015 8:09:10 AM
This post originally appeared on thunderalleybcp.com
Looking over books I’ve read, they comprise an interesting literary travelogue.
I’ve been fortunate enough to get to do a decent amount of traveling in my life. I’ve certainly been to many spots in my native United States. I’ve also made my way to several places in Europe.
But books have allowed me to construct a much more extensive travelogue than my real life wanderings have thus far allowed.
I sometimes feel as though half the books I read are set in England. Somewhat appropriate, given how often I’ve been to London and my natural affinity for the area (thanks to my English ancestry). England is represented by any number of books, from various Dickens classics (Bleak House, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities scratch the surface) to the modern Peter Grant series by Ben Aaronovitch (starting with the excellent Midnight Riot). There’s the Medieval “Templar Mysteries” series by Michael Jecks (starting with The Last Templar). Moving forward a couple hundred years brings David Liss’s Benjamin Weaver books (A Conspiracy of Paper, A Spectacle of Corruption, etc.). Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle explores England (and other parts of the world) in the Middle Ages. There’s the Ripper-era The Yard by Alex Grecian, or the post-World War I Albert Campion mysteries (Mystery Mile, Look to the Lady, etc.) of Margery Allingham. And then a modern comedy with biting class commentary like Julian Fellowes’s Snobs.
My U.K. travelogue isn’t limited to England, of course. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson took me up to Scotland, though I preferred visiting Edinburgh without worrying about being abducted. William Martin’s The Rising of the Moon, while mostly set in Boston, had its climax unfold in Northern Ireland. And Edward Rutherfurd’s The Princes of Ireland and The Rebels of Ireland covered a big swath of the Emerald Isle. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything I’ve read set in Wales, though.
Taking my travelogue to the continent, several Alexandre Dumas novels have brought France to life. The Three Musketeers seems the most distinctly French to me in many ways. Moving north, large chunks of Elizabeth Kostova’s Dracula novel The Historian were set in The Netherlands (with a climactic trip to Romania for good measure). Frederick Forsyth’s ‘60s-set thriller The Odessa File was a vivid portrait of pre-reunification West Germany. Jussi-Adler Olson explored distinctly modern crimes in the Denmark-set The Absent One. Ditto for Camilla Läckberg and Sweden in The Ice Princess. Ayn Rand captured the deprivations of Russia transforming into the Soviet Union in We The Living. From the prior century, Fyodor Dostoyevsky crafted a classic of suffocating, psychological dread with Crime and Punishment that brought Tsarist St. Petersburg to vivid life.
Headed southward, my literary travelogue stopped in Switzerland with Robert Ludlum’s spy classic The Bourne Identity. I much preferred visiting Switzerland in person, without enemy agents chasing me. I’ve actually seen Juliet’s house in Verona, Italy, where William Shakespeare’s iconic Romeo and Juliet took place. The most enjoyable of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon books was Angels & Demons, with its wild chase through the streets of Rome. Across the Aegean Sea, Alan Furst set his moody, suspenseful World War II novel Spies of the Balkans in Salonika, Greece. At the other end of the Mediterranean, Carlos Ruiz Zafón spun The Shadow of the Wind as a tale of revenge and regret in Franco-era Spain. Shadow is also one of the novels most in love with books I’ve ever read.
That exhausts the part of the travelogue in continents where I’ve actually been. In Africa, the second Billy Boyle World War II mystery The First Wave unfolded in Algeria, then part of French North Africa. Agatha Christie (whose British-set mysteries I’ve read prodigiously), enjoyed setting novels in Egypt, like Death on the Nile. Christie even set one Egyptian mystery far in the past, unraveling a murder in the house of a Pharaoh in Death Comes as the End.
Some novels prefer to go to unnamed countries in Africa, as though the continent was one, powerful beast. Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King is the classic “white American finds his soul visiting Darkest Africa” novel. It’s patriarchal in some ways, but still fascinating. Kyle Mills probably used a more generic African country in modern crime thriller Lords of Destruction just so he wouldn’t offend anyone. Heading to the southern tip of Africa, Bryce Courtenay’s The Power of One was a powerful coming of age tale in South Africa that managed to include a lot of humor and a lot of heart.
The travelogue then heads to “The East.” Starting with the Middle East, Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate was a tense political novel set in modern Jerusalem that found time to explore other parts of Israel, too. Christopher Moore started in the same location, two thousand years earlier, in the light-hearted Lamb, told from the perspective of the ne’er-do-well BFF of Jesus. That story took the two friends far afield, including stops in India and China.
Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels may have been based in England during the Napoleonic Wars, but the duo sailed all over the world, including a distant Pacific Malay principality in The Thirteen Gun Salute. James Clavell explored a variety of Asian locales in his detailed, complex novels, including Hong Kong (Noble House), Japan (Shogun) and, in a departure to the Middle East, Iran (Whirlwind). Jo Nesbø sent his Swedish detective Harry Hole to Sydney, Australia in his very first adventure, The Bat. O’Brian had Aubrey and Maturin visit Australia, then a British penal colony, more than once, including in The Nutmeg of Consolation. John Burdett’s crime novels have opened up the fascinating culture of Thailand to western readers in his series beginning with Bangkok 8.
A couple of novels didn’t get quite too specific in their locales. It’s been so long since I’ve read it, I can’t recall if William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies specified where its deserted island was. Robert McCammon’s The Providence Rider took his Colonial era detective Matthew Corbett to a fictional Caribbean island for a tense adventure.
But then, the parts of my literary travelogue that I’ve enjoyed the most might be the stops in places that don’t quite exist. London might be even more fun if Diagon Alley from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was there. “Fun” might not be the word for the Faery lands accessible from England in Sussana Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but they wouldn’t be dull. On the other hand, if the Book World that Jasper Fforde introduced in The Eyre Affair, his first Thursday Next book, was accessible, I’m fairly certain I’m not the only lit fan who would book an excursion.
Jonathan Swift sent his hero to some oddly fascinating lands in Gulliver’s Travels. They seem like they’d be less trying to visit than the hellscapes that H.P. Lovecraft dreamed up for The Dream Cycle. Visiting the countries in A Game of Thrones or The Lord of the Rings could clearly go either way. It would all depend on what sort of supernatural creature was menacing the countryside and who was launching a war at the time.
Robert Heinlen gave readers a glimpse of Mars in Stranger in a Strange Land. Ray Bradbury did the same in The Martian Chronicles. I can’t say that either made a strong case for visiting our planetary neighbor.
I’ll resume my real world travelogue at some point. Until then, it’s nice to know that books have me covered.
