Hill Tower, Jaransor; art by Peter Fitzpatrick

In yesterday’s post on “Keeping Fantasy Fresh — & (With A Teaspoonful Of Luck!) Interesting”, I opined that “The second part of keeping Fantasy real (and fresh, and interesting) is developing those fantastic worlds…”

So in the spirit of that statement, and because I see it’s been generating a few visits lately, and because I am still deep in the mire of copyedit, I have decided to revisit the backlist and re-post “Place As Person.”

If you’ve read it before, I hope you may enjoy it again. If you’re reading it for the first time: enjoy!

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“Place As Person: What Does It Mean When Telling Story?

I first became consciously aware of the interface between place and character as an undergraduate, when writing an essay on the city in literature. As soon as I began researching the topic, I quickly realized that whether Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria or Italo Calvino’s invisible city, these places were so vital to the story being told that they were more than simply setting or backdrop—they were “characters” in their own right.

Of course, utilising the benefits of 20/20 hindsight, I can see that an unconscious awareness of place as character began a great deal earlier—with the snowy forest and lamp-post that was my first experience of Narnia, the encroaching darkness of Alan Garner’s Elidor, and the lonely reaches of Earthsea. Yet ‘place as character’ only implies that locale must be strongly enough drawn to pervade the unfolding story. I believe the premise of “place as person” takes both reader and writer a great deal further and that to realise it fully the place must have an actual personality, i.e. it must in some sense be sentient, or at very least a conscious player in the story’s game.

I wrestled with this premise when writing The Heir of Night and developing both the Wall of Night and wider Haarth world. I believe there is no question that the Wall of Night is “place as character”—its bleak, windblasted, and literally dark physical presence dominates The Heir of Night. But we get no sense that it is either sentient or conscious. On the contrary, its brutal physicality is almost the opposite, a monolithic indifference mirrored in the Derai people who garrison its keeps and holds. But toward the end of the book the world begins to open out for the central characters and they find themselves in a new place, known as Jaransor. Once again, I believe Jaransor exemplifies “place as character”—but if I have done my writer’s work well then the reader may begin to question whether there is not more to the matter:  if it might, in fact, be possible that Jaransor is not just a chaotic force, but a personality, albeit a fractured one, that has consciously entered into the conflict being played out.

The Heir of Night ends with this question unanswered, but I pick it up again in The Gathering of the Lost when Malian, the central protagonist, is forced to ask herself whether not only Jaransor, but the world of Haarth itself, could be aware…

To say any more at this point would be a spoiler, and in fact the jury is still out on how Haarth’s role, if it is indeed a personality, could play out through the series. But I do feel that in order for either the world or a particular place within it, such as Jaransor, to be said to be “place as person” then it must be a conscious participant in the story. And even the possibility—but not necessarily the certainty, because that would be ‘telling’—of that being the case is an exciting notion, one that introduces a Gaian consciousness into my epic fantasy.”

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"Place As Person" first posted on Mary Victoria's Chronicles Of The Tree blog in 2011,
as part of a series celebrating release of the anthology River, edited by Alma Alexander.