At a recent librarians' conference I happened to bring to the lunch table a copy of Geraldine Brooks's excellent novel, "The People of the Book," a fascinating tale that imagines the individuals who, over the centuries, preserved and protected the noted Sarajevo Haggadah.
It is, in its way, a detective story, although the "detective," an Australian expert in the conservation of old books and manuscripts, never learns what the clues mean.
As I might have expected of a book about a book and dedicated by the author "for the librarians," a few of my colleagues had already read and had high praise for it. One, flipping open the cover to the endpapers illustrated with a map showing the travels of the Haggadah, remarked, "Ooh, I just love a book with a map!"
Me too.
I suspect my penchant for maps of imaginary places began with Ernest H. Shepard's depictions of the worlds of Winnie the Pooh and Mr Toad. How much easier to envision the location of Pooh's house in relation to the Bee Tree, the Hundred Aker Wood, and Where the Wozzle Wasn't! How helpful to see Toad Hall and Badger's house in The Willows!
Later on, I pored over the map of The Shire in "The Hobbit" and the simple diagrams of English country villages that used to be standard frontispieces in the Pocket Book editions of Agatha Christie's detective novels. Was there a map of the Hispaniola's voyage in "Treasure Island?" There must have been, but I no longer have a copy. I think there was one of Robinson Crusoe's island but none I can recall of Lemuel Gulliver's travels.
The comment about books with maps stuck with me when I got home from the conference, and one night after I'd crawled into bed to finish the Brooks novel, I began to wonder about all the books in my book-lined bedroom: which of them contained maps? I crawled back out of bed, and with notebook at hand, did some random browsing.
Most of the histories, for obvious reasons, have one or more maps; a map is surely the easiest way to illustrate a battlefield, a voyage of discovery, or the extent of an empire, and a quick trip through the volumes on my shelves bore this out: David McCullough's "1776," Peter L. Bernstein's "Wedding of the Waters," Nathaniel Philbrick's "Mayflower," Brian Hicks's "Ghost Ship," Thomas Cahill's Hinges of History series, Karen Armstrong's histories of religion.
Among the non-fiction titles, Claire Tomalin's definitive "Jane Austen: a life" comes with a delightfully illustrated map of Steventon and the houses of the Austens' Hampshire neighbors.
What I sought were fabricated guides to places peopled by fictitious characters, and the ones I found were surprising.
Thanks, apparently, to the detailed engineering and architectural records of the Roman Empire, novelists dealing with ancient Rome and surrounds---Robert Harris's "Imperium" and "Pompeii," the detective novels of Lindsey Davis and Steven Saylor---are able to put the reader in the picture, literally. Likewise, the spy novels of Francine Mathews set in World War II Paris and Patrick O'Brian's swashbuckling "The Road to Samarkand" make use of factual topography.
Peter Robinson's "First Cut" provides a minimalist plan of the British coast, and Cathi Unsworth's compilation, "London Noir," shows, on a stylized map of the metropolis, where the bodies were found, if not buried. A map of Cold War Europe, necessary for tracking the path of the title character, illuminates the endpapers of "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova.
The biggest challenge to a novelist---and the most fun, it seems to me---is to make up a world that never was and use it as the setting, in some cases, the linchpin, of the story. C.S. Lewis did it with Narnia; J.K. Rowling did it with Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. (Remember the Marauders' Map?) Ross Lockridge famously did so with "Raintree County," which, in his own words, "had no boundaries in time and space, where lurked musical and strange names and mythical and lost peoples, and which was itself only a name musical and strange."
It is good to know that the map, as literary device, lives on. James Anderson's retro mystery series set in pre-World War II England ("The Affair of the Blood-Stained Egg Cosy" et seq.) always features a floor plan of Alderly, the country house of Lord and Lady Burford, identifying the rooms of the house guests. It reminds me of nothing so much as the Clue game board.
I almost missed the last map of my search because I did not expect to find it on the dust jacket, of all places, of Garrison Keillor's "Pontoon." Here at last is the topography of Lake Wobegon, complete with Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, the Sidetrack Tap, the Chatterbox Cafe, Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, the high school... and you know what? It looks pretty much the way I imagined it.
