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The Island, Swallows & Amazons - Robin Blake on maps in books

Reading Maps

Last year the Bodleian Library paid £55,000 for a fold-out map torn from a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring and scribbled over by J. R. R. Tolkien. Maps, said one of the Bodleian curators, were central to Tolkien’s storytelling and he had annotated this one to guide the illustrator Pauline Baynes, who was making a poster map of Middle Earth (see SF no. 41). I was delighted that it had landed safely in a public collection. In my opinion a good map always enhances a good book, especially when the author and a skilled illustrator have worked on it together.

I formed this opinion early in life. When I was 10 I read Friday’s Tunnel, the first of John Verney’s witty and exciting (and marvellously self-illustrated) stories about the Callendar family. On page one the 12-year-old narrator February Callendar boldly reworks the first sentence of Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice trenchantly states the necessity in a story for pictures and conversation. February’s version insists on a third essential element. ‘I intend this to be the kind of book I like to read, which means one with a map and drawings and talk on every page.’ Yes! I thought. This is going to be the kind of book I like to read too.

The first map I ever saw in a book was at the even tenderer age of 4, when I opened Winnie-the-Pooh and found on the endpapers a panoptic view – an Owl’s-eye view and a deliciously privileged view – of the whole of the Hundred Acre Wood. It showed every principal tree (most being individual characters’ houses), the ‘Trap for Heffalumps’, ‘Where the Woozle Wasn’t’ and all the other key places.

In 1931, five years after his success with Pooh, Shepard was commissioned to illustrate The Wind in the Willows and his endpapers again provided a soaring overview of the story’s world: Toad Hall with its lawns running down to the river, the Wild Wood, Pan Island, the houses of Badger and

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Last year the Bodleian Library paid £55,000 for a fold-out map torn from a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring and scribbled over by J. R. R. Tolkien. Maps, said one of the Bodleian curators, were central to Tolkien’s storytelling and he had annotated this one to guide the illustrator Pauline Baynes, who was making a poster map of Middle Earth (see SF no. 41). I was delighted that it had landed safely in a public collection. In my opinion a good map always enhances a good book, especially when the author and a skilled illustrator have worked on it together.

I formed this opinion early in life. When I was 10 I read Friday’s Tunnel, the first of John Verney’s witty and exciting (and marvellously self-illustrated) stories about the Callendar family. On page one the 12-year-old narrator February Callendar boldly reworks the first sentence of Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice trenchantly states the necessity in a story for pictures and conversation. February’s version insists on a third essential element. ‘I intend this to be the kind of book I like to read, which means one with a map and drawings and talk on every page.’ Yes! I thought. This is going to be the kind of book I like to read too. The first map I ever saw in a book was at the even tenderer age of 4, when I opened Winnie-the-Pooh and found on the endpapers a panoptic view – an Owl’s-eye view and a deliciously privileged view – of the whole of the Hundred Acre Wood. It showed every principal tree (most being individual characters’ houses), the ‘Trap for Heffalumps’, ‘Where the Woozle Wasn’t’ and all the other key places. In 1931, five years after his success with Pooh, Shepard was commissioned to illustrate The Wind in the Willows and his endpapers again provided a soaring overview of the story’s world: Toad Hall with its lawns running down to the river, the Wild Wood, Pan Island, the houses of Badger and Ratty, and the discreet site of Mole End, with its skittle alley and forecourt lined with plaster statues of ‘Garibaldi, the infant Samuel, Queen Victoria, and other heroes of modern Italy’. There had been three previous illustrators of Kenneth Grahame’s book since its first publication in 1908, but none had attempted such a picture. Shepard’s now seems indispensable. It may seem a stretch to say that play-world picture maps resemble those medieval images of earthly creation, of which the best known is Hereford Cathedral’s Mappa Mundi. Yet these are also eye-view illustrations, though it is God’s and not a bird’s eye that does the viewing. Hereford’s circular map, with Jerusalem at its centre, has over a thousand illustrations of buildings, ships, beasts, monsters and other real or imaginary parts and inhabitants. In fiction there are many maps of this type, mostly of fantasy worlds like Middle Earth, Oz, the Seven Kingdoms, Earthsea, Narnia and a hundred others. L. Frank Baum’s original map of Oz is diagrammatic rather than pictorial, yet it is very like a Mappa Mundi in that it shows four colour-coded territories to the North, South, East and West, all bounded by an impenetrable desert, and with the Emerald City, like Jerusalem, occupying the exact radial centre. At least eighteen further maps of Oz, both ramifications and expansions of Baum’s, appeared as the franchise flourished after the author’s death, making Oz a fascinating case study in fictional cartography. The map of a fictional mythology can always be checked by its author. A more slippery problem is posed by actual mythology, where nothing is stable and no one can authenticate the topography. Even the ancient Greek geographer Strabo doubted whether it was possible to draw a map for the Odyssey. ‘You will find the scene of Odysseus’s wanderings when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of winds,’ he wrote. Yet many stabs have been made at charting the course of the hero’s voyage, one of the most successful being in the endpapers of T. E. Lawrence’s prose translation. This shows the round Homeric world with ‘Regions of Night’ to the north, ‘Regions of Day’ to the south, and a version of the Mediterranean Sea in between. The outline of Greece is entirely recognizable, as are the Nile Delta, Cyprus and Crete. But this is not Mercator’s projection. It is a Mappa Mundi of the imagination with, at its centre, a ‘sea so vast and dread that not even in a twelvemonth could a bird hope to wing its way out’, as Lawrence’s version puts it. The further west this sea extends the less recognizable to the modern eye it becomes: Italy is a stump, Spain is nothing but an east-facing coastline, the Aeolian Islands exist in two locations simultaneously and, should you be fool enough to navigate past the Pillars of Hercules (or Straits of Gibraltar), the map shows you would be swept into a tempestuous river-ocean that circles and bounds all the known world. Other editions offering map-guides to the Homeric world try to justify the myth in terms of the ‘real’ geography of the region. The hybrid in T. E. Lawrence’s Homer is far more satisfying. These maps illuminate a book’s entire world, but other book-maps have the quite different function of providing a hinge for the plot. They are usually more diagrammatic – perhaps of an escape route, the streets of a dubious town or the plan of a haunted house – and what they convey, above all, is the spirit of adventure. T. E. Lawrence was himself a trained military map-maker and he provided his Seven Pillars of Wisdom with beautiful coloured cartography ‘adapted from War Office material as embodied in GSGS 2957’, which well serves the book’s double identity as both a military history and a glorified boy’s adventure story. The prototype of the late-Victorian juvenile adventure genre, devoured by boys of Lawrence’s generation, is R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, published in 1883. A map is so important in this that, after an extended prelude at the Admiral Benbow Inn, the action only really starts as Dr Livesey breaks the seals of the package found in the dead pirate’s sea chest and ‘there fell out the map of an island, with latitude and longitude, soundings, names of hills, bays and inlets, and every particular to bring a ship to a safe anchorage’. The chart, which Stevenson made sure was printed beside the text, is of a kind known as a portolan – a navigational chart – but what sets the imagination tingling, for characters and reader alike, are the ‘several additions of a later date . . . above all, three crosses of red ink – two on the north part of the island, one in the south-west, and, beside this last . . . these words: “Bulk of treasure here”.’ Not many adventure stories are as famous as Treasure Island but a rival appeared only a year later: H. Rider Haggard’s colonial veld-buster King Solomon’s Mines. The rivalry was admitted. Haggard had bet a friend that he could turn out a land-based story every bit as successful as Stevenson’s sea saga, and he pulled it off with a plot, written at incredible speed, that similarly turns on the existence of a secret map. This is a crude land map whose primacy Haggard’s first publisher stressed by providing a ‘facsimile’ in a fold-out frontispiece. It is coloured in rusty red on white, since the map was drawn (we are told) in a desert cave using the last drops of the mapmaker’s own blood. He wanted, as he lay dying, to point the way across the African veld to ‘Kukuanaland’ where, as the map’s inscription says, ‘with my own eyes I have seen the countless diamonds stored in Solomon’s treasure chamber’. To get there, the white hunter Allan Quatermain must find two hills which the map labels (enticingly for its boy readers) ‘Sheba’s Breasts’. He must then ‘climb the snow of Sheba’s left breast till he reaches the nipple, on the north side of which is the great road Solomon made, from whence three days’ journey to the King’s Palace’. Most of Arthur Ransome’s ‘Swallows and Amazons’ books are founded in stories of the Stevenson-Haggard type, being about pirates, gold mining, seafaring and exploration. Their originality lay in showing ‘real’ children acting the adventures out as elaborate holiday games to which the world of adults is substantially ‒ but never completely ‒ subordinated. Ransome’s endpaper maps underline this lineage back to the adventure stories that he had read as a boy, and he published no book without them. He also occasionally incorporated more detailed maps among the illustrations: the island in Swallows and Amazons itself; the area around Beckfoot with the ruined building in which Dorothea and Dick hide out in The Picts and the Martyrs; and the paths taken up the glen by the Decoys and Red Herrings in Great Northern? to divert the egg collector from the rare birds’ nest. Ransome’s interest in maps peaked with Secret Water, the plot of which revolves entirely around the holiday task set for the Walker children by their father – to make maps while ‘marooned’ on an island somewhere in a muddy Essex estuary. As a besotted 9-year-old my eyes dwelled again and again on Ransome’s maps. If I catch sight of one now, a whole year of my childhood reading flashes past my mind’s eye with a Proustian jolt. Maps may be common in fantasy and historical novels, and not unusual in children’s stories and detective fiction, but literary fiction rarely has them. I have seen editions of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway with useful plans of the protagonists’ movements around London, and of Tarka the Otter with maps of Exmoor and ‘the two rivers’, though the latter appeared only after the book landed on the children’s bookshelf, having originally been published as an adult title. I have seen, too, an illustrated map of Proust’s Paris, but only in the endpapers of Stéphane Heuet’s extraordinary and Tintinesque graphic version of À La Recherche du temps perdu. Another novel series, Trollope’s Barchester stories, boasts a charming hand-drawn map of Barsetshire, with Plumstead Episcopi, Gatherum Castle and other significant places marked, but this appears only in the Penguin Classics de luxe edition. There is surely scope for more of the kind. Why not a route map of Humbert Humbert’s flight with Lolita across America, or a map of Jay Gatsby’s Long Island, or of Cranford, Middlemarch, Blandings Castle, Gormenghast? If there is one heavyweight literary novel that cries out for an integral map it is James Joyce’s Ulysses, showing the streets and squares of Dublin as they were in 1904 – ideally reprinted from the street plan in Thom’s Official Directory that Joyce kept continually before him as he wrote the book in far-away Trieste. Vladimir Nabokov, when teaching the novel at Cornell, would insist that his students ‘had to know the map of Dublin. I believe in stressing the detail; the general ideas can take care of themselves.’ Yet of more than thirty different post-copyright editions of Ulysses only one that I am aware of (an Oxford World’s Classic) prints a map to help the reader with the rides and perambulations of Stephen Dedalus and Bloom. This may even be a reproduction from Thom’s, though unfortunately it appears too small to identify any but the most obvious of the book’s locations. Luckily, in this regard, help is at hand. There exists a magnificent atlas of Ulysses by Ian Gunn and Clive Hart, James Joyce’s Dublin, which has maps of various scopes and scales, and which even gives an axiometric plan showing the whole interior of 7 Eccles Street, the marital home of Leopold and Molly Bloom. From a literary point of view, a map in a novel is never just a set of instructions, as for getting to Kukuanaland or finding your way from the Shire to Mount Doom. It is more like a kind of reverse ekphrasis – the expression of a written text in graphic form, marked up with names and descriptions (‘Eeyore’s Gloomy Place’, ‘Here Be Dragons’) and sometimes with figures and landscape details. Unlike preparing for a real journey, then, it makes little sense to consult such a map before reading the book. Its purpose is to be there for you as you go along, and it may then be looked over again when the book is finished, because a literary map offers a different and quite satisfying way to revisit a book. Even if you haven’t looked at Winnie-the-Pooh for years, I guarantee a few moments of instant pleasure should you flip open the cover and have a good read of ‘100 Aker Wood Drawn by me Mr Shepard Helpd’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 53 © Robin Blake 2017


About the contributor

All of Robin Blake’s mystery stories featuring Titus Cragg and Luke Fidelis contain maps of eighteenth-century Preston and the surrounding country.

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