Posted: Monday 3 November 2008
Fictional Towns
I recently read a novel where the town in which much of the action takes place is vividly described. The author is in fact describing a real town and the detail is so clear that you can easily reconstruct the layout of the streets, and the position of the abbey, the school, the station, a hotel and various other landmarks. The town's setting is also given clearly. It's in Dorset, and the roads linking it to other towns are described, as is the character of the surrounding landscape - the hills, valleys, farmland and woodland. I think it's a great book - with a cast of bizarre characters.
The novel was written in the 1920s so I imagine that the nature and extent of the town has changed, but not, presumably, the positions of the major buildings. Possibly not by much, though. It is still widely known as one of the prettiest towns in the country, full of historic buildings built of limestone and flint. The book's description means that the town is effectively immortalised in print, and an image of how it was then is frozen in time.
But the strange thing is that the author gives it another name. It is actually Sherborne in Dorset, but instead he calls it Ramsgard. Why? It must have been very obvious to anyone living there that it was Sherborne, and most readers who did not know the area would have quickly been able to identify it, if they had wanted to. The author even went to Sherborne School as a pupil.
There are, of course, many other examples of this coyness by authors over the naming of real towns in their works. In some the camouflage is such that it is harder to identify the real town. In Coming up for air by George Orwell, much of the book is about the main character's search for the village where he spent his boyhood, called Lower Binfield by Orwell. The village is described in great detail, through the memories of the character, and he eventually does find it - although in this case the passage of time has changed it dramatically. Here the position of the town relative to the landscape, and various other clues, narrow it down to a Thames-side town in Berkshire - my guess is either Maidenhead or Henley, probably the latter as Orwell's family lived in Henley when he was young (later on they lived in Suffolk, near the River Orwell, from which the writer took his pen-name). At the other extreme, some authors make no attempt to disguise the town being described. Dublin is clearly named in Joyce's Ulysses, for example. It would have been quite ridiculous to have given it another name.
I don't know why such a wide variety of approaches exist in fiction - and there's not room to go any further into it here. But it seems to me to be a fertile area for study for someone. It also shows how important it is to look carefully at our surroundings - clearly the best writers do that, and they often weave their own experience of places into their work.
Thomas Hardy renamed virtually every town in Dorset in the course of his novels: Dorchester became Casterbridge, Weymouth became Budmouth and Shaftesbury became Sherston. Perhaps John Cowper Powys, the author of Wolf Solent, described above, renamed Sherborne partly in homage to Hardy? Interestingly, though, Hardy had himself already renamed it Sherton Abbas in his novel, Woodlanders.