I read an article in the Guardian a couple of days ago, which I’ve been pondering on and off since: “[A]s more of us are spending our summer holidays in the UK, we asked writers to recall the book that for them best captures somewhere special on our shores…” It was a great list. I wanted to play.
I made myself a cup of tea, settled back in my chair–and drew a complete and utter blank. I couldn’t conjure up a single, crystal clear image of a specific, particular, English place described in fiction. Not one.
I came up with many generalised images–just about everything ever written by Rosemary Sutcliffe and Henry Treece–but they weren’t specific, weren’t particular, weren’t named. I couldn’t point to them on a map with any confidence. I reached back to school books, to Lorna Doone, and Wuthering Heights. Nothing but vague notions of moors and a certain brooding quality.
It dawned on me that what I absorb from novels, landscape wise, is mood: wild and haunted forest, dappled and peaceful clearing, cold and still heath at dawn, warm and drowsy kitchen garth in mid-afternoon. I recall smell and texture and sound, how it all made me feel, but I don’t see it.
That surprised me–and, on some level, disturbed me. I bore down. I was determined to come up with some perfect image.
The next surprise was that the landscapes I did finally come up are all wholly imaginary: the seitches of Arakis, the towers of Minas Tirith, the sands of Damar. I tried harder, pushed farther, frowned, drummed my pencil on the desk. Patrick O’Brian! Yes! But, no, not quite: what I really remember of the Aubrey/Maturin novels are the ships. I’m not sure they count. They were almost always in foreign waters.
Then I got desperate. The elegaic old English poem “The Ruin.” (Go read it; it’s a beautiful poem.) A couple of Shakespeare’s sonnets (especially Sonnet 73, which is just an eight-hundred-years-later version of “The Ruin”). Sappho mourning her loneliness as the moon sets, and the Pleiades… (Not even English, sigh.)
But then I remembered with relief Roger Deakin: Wildwood, and Notes From Walnut Tree Farm. A couple of snatches of Richard Mabey. The beginning of Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places. (I think of them as the R Lads.) All non-fiction, though. And, even so, it’s the sound of wind in trees I remember, the flash of a sparrowhawk, the creaking of frogs, the gnarled bark under the hand. I feel it; I don’t see it.
I see so clearly when I write. I’ve always imagined I saw clearly when I read. Perhaps I do. Perhaps this feeling vs. seeing is a function of recall, or of how the memory is laid down in the first place. It’s all very strange.
So now I’m curious. How you read such things. What visual images from a novel will be with you forever?
Nicola Griffith 
Well to the first bit– Jeff Noon's Manchester. & doesn't Tolkien's Shire just count as England?
Big, bird's eye views– the canals of Mars, the plains between Minas Tirith & Minas Morgul, the streets of a city…that is the place that sticks with me.
Most of my clearest images tend to be from childhood books: Tom's Midnight Garden, The Secret Garden, the first river in The Water Babies, the floorboard house in The Borrowers, Rat's den or Toad Hall in the Wind and the Willows, or all those wonderful descriptions of Prince Edward Island from the Anne books. I wonder if there is something about the vitality of “place” in children's literature that makes it different from adult, or if I just experienced those books differently as a young reader.
Not sure about forever, but the places in Tana French's novels seem very real. From The Likeness, Whitethorn House and the lanes surrounding it and the famine cottage where the body was found; or the dig from In the Woods.
The Last Summer of You and Me by Ann Brashares is very evocative of life on New York’s Fire Island.
If you want to go for “childhood” memories, there's the dig in Northern Iraq or the Georgetown area surrounding the events in The Exorcist.
For that matter, I visually remember many of the places in the Aud series — especially the cabin and the isolated farmhouse from Stay.
I'm drawn to the mood of a setting too. The darker and more menacing, at times, the better. As a kid I was less interested in Laura Ingalls Wilder and her little house on the desolate prairie than I was in some shadowy manse entwined with everything that dares to encroach…Oh. My. God. I guess that explains why I loved 'Rebecca' so much. That damn Manderly. My sister and I still taunt each other by signing messages 'RdeW'. Loved, loved, loved Mrs. Danvers!
Oh, and now I'm rambling.
Absolutely first thing to come to mind: Dorothy Sayer's Oxford in 'Gaudy Night.' In terms of children's books, Rye and its environs from Malcolm Seville's Lone Pine adventures, as well as the Welsh borders. And weren't the Cadfael mysteries set in Shrewsbury? Peter Robinson's Yorkshire (although I guess Eastvale is fictional).
But I do agree that a lot of what I've read gives a general sense of Englishness, rather than a portrait of a specific town or region.
Recently read Will North's 'Water Stone Heart' set in Boscastle (Cornwall). Each chapter begins with a historical flood report, so the fiction is enhanced by the power of what actually took place. I absolutely loved the description of the place and want to go there…along with everyone else who probably read the book.
Sorry, also, when (as a kid) I read CS Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, I listened to Cesar Franck as I read — the coupling of this particular music and story are forever melded in my mind. I hear the music today and still see the other-world.
The Crunch and Des stories of fishing off the coast of Florida and John D.'s the Busted Flush and then the small town silence in John Barth's the Floating Opera and of course, Vonnegut's time in the bombed out city of Dresden and the opening scene (probably because I read it so recently) of the Blue Place as Aud in the rain walks the night. I read everyone of these because the author took me there and I was eager to go.