Dear Mr Cornwell
Thank you for a life-time of pleasure. I read my first Sharpe book in 1982 (?) while at university and have dipped in and out ever since. Now, aged 60, I have just read the latest and it has allowed me to recall the various happy times - family holidays and so forth where the sun was always shinning, the bottle still had some wine left, the children were happy and there was sometimes a Sharpe book within reach.
Been going through my late father's papers and have come across the attached, about books with maps in them, which raises the question why no maps. Perhaps there are, and I am just mis-remembering, so maybe the question should be why not greater use of maps?
Chaps and Maps
E.C. Bentley, writing in Biography for Beginners, usefully pointed out that, ‘The art of Biography/Is different from Geography./Geography is about maps,/ But Biography is about chaps.’
But I believe that books about chaps can be much improved by the inclusion of some maps. Take R.L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, I have actually seen one edition without its famous map – this is like, as they say, Hamlet without the Prince, and only one step removed from sacrilege; the saving of the map by Jim Hawkins provides the start of the story and the justification for the journey to recover Flint’s fabulous wealth buried somewhere on the island, its inclusion in the novel enables the reader to follow the events described. I must have spent hours poring over it and then trying to copy it on paper scorched at the edges and stained with tea.
When you look around there are quite a lot of novels which include maps. For instance, J.R.R. Tolkien’s, A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, the splendid juvenile historical novels of Cynthia Harnett, the Roman novels of Lindsey Davis and Robert Harris, the Brother Cadfael novels of Ellis Peters, and the American Civil War novels by Michael Shaara, his son Jeff and by Newt Gingrich (remember him?) in collaboration with William Forstchen.
I have discussed this matter with our fellow villager and prolific writer of historical fiction Ariana Franklin (a.k.a. Diana Norman). Her novel Mistress of the Art of Death is set in medieval Cambridge, and she told me that it was the publisher’s idea to include a map of the town. But it was her own construction based on investigations into the 12th century town, and necessarily conjectural since there are no maps of it before the establishment of the University 800 years ago. She went on to say that she now feels that this was a valuable addition to the book and that she will probably suggest the inclusion of maps in her writings in future.
Serious readers may well think that all this shows an infantile attitude to reading – an adult could surely make do without such props? Well, so be it, but, in my view, James Joyce’s Ulysses would gain a great deal from having a map to accompany the text since the book is so firmly rooted in the Dublin of 1904 (interestingly, key points in the novel are marked out by plaques set into the streets of the city, some of them now well worn); a useful guide is So this is Dyoublong?, published by the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, a map of the city in Joyce’s time replete with notes relating to all of Joyce’s major works and not just Ulysses.
He is one of two writers I know of whose admirers have thought it useful to supply maps to complement the texts, thus making amends for the authors’ omissions. The second is a poet rather than a novelist – Dante Alighieri, and his Divine Comedy, dealing with Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. The Sayers/Reynolds translation published by Penguin between 1949 and 1962 has striking diagrams by C.W. Scott-Giles (who he?) showing the structure of the features of the other world, derived, I assume, from a close reading of the texts which greatly help the reader.
On the other hand, my wife has long been of the opinion, and has now just reminded me of the fact, that the inclusion of a map in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose would have led to the end of the story in very short order and so it was perhaps wise of the author not to have one.
Lewis Carroll is an interesting writer in this regard. Alice at the start of Alice in Wonderland deplores the absence of pictures and conversations in books. She says nothing about maps, yet her creator in the sequel to Alice – Through the Looking Glass – prefaces the text with an unusual map setting out the events in the book by means of an annotated chess match. On the other hand, the cartographic approach of The Hunting of the Snark must be unique. This is a bizarre tale in verse form of a maritime hunt for a mythical beast, the snark. The captain (known as the Bellman) thoughtfully provides a map for the crew –
He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.
‘What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones and Meridian Lines?’
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
‘They are merely conventional signs!’
To bear this out, the map has the usual labelling that one would expect to find, but placed apparently haphazardly around its sides.i It cannot be said to be of much use, but the crew do find a snark, and then this turns out to be a boojum.ii
And as for myself, I shall continue to look out for maps in novels and silently applaud those writers thoughtful enough to include them J.B. Poole
Adam Poole