I spoke once to a distinguished dramatist who was hesitating about writing his first novel. “I hate novels,” he said. “All those descriptions.” He went on to write a very good novel that, in the tradition of, say, Ivy Compton-Burnett, consisted largely of dialogue. Clearly Literary Landscapes will not be for him. It is for the rest of us, who cherish “the descriptions” that create and embody the world of the novel, that it is addressed. The present volume is the terrestrial counterpart of Laura Miller’s Literary Wonderlands, which celebrates the fantastical; offering short essays on more than 70 novels, the book sets out, its editor John Sutherland tells us, to explore “thereness” and the accompanying “fluidities and meltingness that places are subject to”. The selection follows three criteria: each book must conjure a land that exists or has existed; the books must be rooted in historical time as well as landscape; and in them place must always be more than setting.
The collection is divided into four chronological sections, from the 19th-century Romantics to the modernist period, from postwar panoramas to contemporary geographies. It is not entirely clear why the survey should start in the 19th century – are Fielding’s or Tobias Smollett’s landscapes less vivid than those of their successors? Or Goethe’s? Or Rétif de la Bretonne’s? To say nothing of Rabelais. But its range is nonetheless remarkable, considering that it deals largely with fiction and avoids travel writing altogether, however distinguished its literary pedigree. It takes in not only the self-selecting great depicters of place – Dickens and Balzac, Hardy and Joyce – but also Alessandro Manzoni, August Strindberg, Jorge Amado, Chinua Achebe, the to-me-unknown Dutch writer Gerard Reve and his Norwegian confrère Tarjei Vesaas, a whole swathe of writers from Port of Spain, New Zealand, Kars, Henan province, Kolkata and the Amazon rainforest, as well as Winnie-the-Pooh, Anne of Green Gables and the somewhat more downmarket Grace Metalious (of Peyton Place fame) and Françoise Sagan.
The contributions are written by some 45 different essayists. Inevitably, they vary in their success, attempting as they do thumbnail sketches of the author and her or his world as well as the precise nature of their relationship to the landscapes they create: the one on Bleak House (by Nicholas Lezard) brilliantly evokes Dickens’s charnel house London and his hallucinatory metaphorical transformation of what he has seen. The Wuthering Heights entry (by Sutherland, as it happens) is full of illuminations: “Heathcliff,” he writes, “seems never to have been born of woman but to have been generated by the landscape in its cruellest moments.” But by its end, the novel has encompassed “the rich landscape in its possible tenderness as well as its violent excess”.
This piece is followed in the book by a reproduction, spread over two pages, of an uncharacteristic, unpeopled painting by LS Lowry, Wuthering Heights, from 1942, illustrating, despite its essentially peaceful tone, the epic loneliness of the landscape. The picture thus adds a harmonic to the novel, which is where the book really comes into its own. Designed by Jim Tierney, with text designed by Peter Ross, it is, as Sutherland perhaps immodestly claims, a sumptuous book, in which the juxtaposition of text and images is a great part of its impact. The Age of Innocence piece is illustrated with a stunning Currier and Ives lithograph of New York City in 1870, which gives us at a stroke the circumscribed scope of the social world of Wharton’s characters; Kirchner’s extraordinary Davos in Winter, painted while he was in Switzerland to improve his health, perfectly complements WB Gooderham’s thoughts on The Magic Mountain. Perhaps most impressive, Strindberg’s untypically realistic island novel The People of Hemsö is accompanied by his own stupendous painting of the sea against which the protagonist struggles and, in the end, loses.
Later entries include Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) with its depiction of London “as an exhausting, beguiling beast”, as Kate McNaughton says in her essay, and Miguel Bonnefoy’s Black Sugar, published only last year, which evokes the Venezuelan rainforest, yielding up “the spirit and culture of … pura vida”, according to Drew Smith. “In that sense it speaks for a continent.” As Sutherland correctly remarks, “no one reading this … book will be tempted to think of literary landscape as mere background.” And it is hard to think of any lover of fiction who would not be beguiled by its beauty and frequent shafts of insight.
• Literary Landscapes: Charting the Worlds of Classic Literature, edited by John Sutherland is published by Modern. To order a copy for £22 (RRP £25) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
