03 Nov 2011 10:39:56
What a dangerous, dangerous website. I can tell I am going to have to limit my time on Book Drum's new literary map or I'm really not going to get anything done at all. Its creators say it's the first ever crowd-sourced literary world map, and it's already packed with information from contributors, from Wide Sargasso Sea, pinpointed in Granbois, Dominica ("based on Jean Rhys's father's estate of Bona Vista") and Thornfield, Yorkshire ("Antoinette is imprisoned in the attic at Thornfield Hall, where she is to be found, as Bertha, in Jane Eyre"), to Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow in Greenland's Qaanaaq, the northernmost town in the world.
Text and pictures illustrate each location, giving a whole new insight, for generally-desk-bound-me at least, into the Gulf of Mexico (The Old Man and the Sea), The Chrysalids (set in a post-apocalyptic Labrador), the Chatham Islands of Cloud Atlas and the Congo of The Poisonwood Bible. Its creators hope users will enjoy working out puzzles such as how close Bridget Jones and Fanny Price lived, and how far the Snow Goose would have to fly to reach Brave New World's lighthouse: I've been having fun searching for the most remote tags – from Svalbard, Philip Pullman's armoured bear island from Northern Lights, to Lord of the Flies, which gets its little red pin on an "uninhabited tropical island" in the middle of the Pacific.
Just looking at the books scattered around me in my office, I'm desperate to start tagging latitudes and longitudes for Lauren Beukes's Zoo City, set in an alternate Johannesburg, for the Gravesend, New Hampshire of A Prayer for Owen Meany, for the zombie-ridden Manhattan of Colson Whitehead's Zone One. And continuing my interest in the remoter literary locations, where, I wonder, in the North Atlantic should Pincher Martin go?
My only worry is that if other people like the map as much as me, the planet will quickly become covered in pins and it'll become difficult to work out what's where. Australia, though, is currently something of a literary desert: let me go and find my copies of Walkabout, and The Thorn Birds, and A Town Like Alice, and start placing my little red pins.
