A Sense of Place (and some)

If you are looking for a masterclass in creating a sense of place, please can I strongly recommend Hannah Kent's debut novel, Burial Rites. (The only downside to this book is the look you get when someone says, "Ooh, what are you reading?" and you reply, "Oh..er...it's called Burial Rites." They shrink away with a funny expression and assume you're up to your ears in a gore-fest. But that's by the by.)

As a writer, it's taken me a while to grasp the importance of creating a strong sense of place. I've been through phases of thinking that a tight plot is what matters most, or flow, or theme, or characterisation, but for a long time 'sense of place' came low on my list.* I think I worried that it meant writing the kind of long, boring, descriptive passage that can be airlifted out of chapter three and dropped into the middle of chapter 56 without affecting the story one way or another. Is there anything more tedious than a book which begins :"The manufacturing town of X lay in a long valley in the county of Y, twelve miles from the city of Z with which it was connected by a road and a railway. In the year in which our story opens, the population exceeded twenty thousand...."?  Is there anything more mind-numbing than an exhaustive description of the layout of a house, which will probably be crucial to the plot (because if you're not 100% sure that the library is the second room on the left as you come down the stairs and therefore adjacent to the dining room and opposite the parlour, then how can you possibly visualise Cecily hiding behind the door in the music room with a perfect view of the hall mirror, in which she will witness Albert and Gertrude kiss/conspire/cudgel one another?), but which you just can't (be bothered to) picture in your mind's eye.  

Hannah Kent does not indulge in this kind of information-dump-disguised-as-descriptive-passage. The place where she has set her fact-based novel - 1820s Iceland - is not an add-on to be hurried through in an opening chapter before the actual story can begin. (The opening sentence is, "They said I must die", which a lot more arresting and novelistic than any topographical fact, even one that concerns a country as exciting as Iceland.) Sense of Place weaves in and out of Burial Rites like a black thread in a sombre tapestry. Sometimes Hannah Kent's Iceland becomes the story; sometimes it is a character in its own right; always it sets the grim, haunting and oddly humane tone. It is never inert; never a flat backdrop. Without the mists, the snows, the howling winds, the smell of the sea, and the crouching farm buildings, the progress of the seasons and the rituals of the farming year, there wouldn't be a novel.

I wish I could create such a strong and pervasive fictional place. This is a truly inspirational book. Here's a taste:

     "I'm not sure why I opened the door to look outside. I suppose I was curious. But some strange compulsion took me and I unlocked the latch to peek out at the weather.
     It was an evil sight. Dark clouds bore down upon the mountain range and under their smoky-blackness, a grey swarm of snow swirled as far as you could see. The wind was fierce, and a great icy gust of it suddenly blew against the door so hard that it knocked me off my feet. The candle on the corridor wall went out in an instant, and from within the croft Bjorn shouted what the Devil I thought I was doing, letting the blizzard into his home.
     I heaved against the door to shut it, but the wind was too strong. My hands stiffened with the cold rush of air. It was as though the wind was some form of ghoul demanding to enter. Then, all of a sudden, the wind dropped, and the door slammed shut. As though the spirit had finally entered and closed the door behind it."

  

* As for whether it's intelligent to think of such things in terms of hierarchies, that's another question, to which I'm pretty certain the answer is 'No'.