Places with a Voice - Mari Biella
One thing that I’ve always appreciated in fiction is a fully realised sense of place: a writer’s ability to bring a real or imagined landscape to life on the page or screen. Not too long ago, I read Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café , and found that it made the American Deep South – an area with which I’m actually unfamiliar – seem absolutely real and immediate. By the time I’d turned the last page, I felt that I’d just paid a visit to the Georgia town in which it was set. And, to McCullers’ credit, I hadn’t felt like a gormless tourist once, but almost like a local. Putting the book down, I was surprised to find myself back in Northern Italy on a chilly autumn night. Many of my favourite books share this quality: they allow the reader to immerse him- or herself in the world in which the story occurs. In the hands of a skilled author, the reader can move quite easily through an unfamiliar place, and never feel like a stranger. Place. It’s more than just a geographi...