Where in the World: Chapter 19

Even avoiding the deeper layer of meaning in a book’s setting, location is a major factor in plot. A large, incalculable percent of stories would make a smaller impact, a diluted point, or no sense at all if moved somewhere else. Location can make or break a story. We take Jane Austin’s women out of conservative England and they are fish out of their tea infused, tepid water. We take Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner out of Kabul and it is lost, without context and without purpose. Where a story takes place is up there in importance to a novel’s plot with characters and motivations. If we were to move Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain into the North, into a different state, or even to a different town, the entire story changes. We would lose the cold indifference of the Southern Blue Ridge Mountains towards our struggling protagonists. The environment of the story here plays a part as one of the many antagonists. We would lose the historical context of the Civil War’s outcome, the knowledge that the South will lose the war. This is one of the facets of this novel that makes it so enthralling. We know something for certain that the characters don’t. We know that the situation in the South is not going to get better. We know that their fate is sealed by history and there is no way around that. We know all of this just from the fact that our characters are south of the Mason-Dixon line. And all of this information we gather from location feeds into theme and tone. What we learn about the geography and climate and traditions and history of a location makes up how we feel about it. For example, those harsh, cold mountains and barren plains of the Civil War South push down on us with a feeling of loneliness and despair and we begin to feel what the characters feel.

Of course, location without context is just as vital. Obviously, Hobbiton and Mordor are entirely fantasy, but they are geography too. The rolling hills and sharp mountains of Middle Earth still bring stories and ideas to a scene without having any basis in history or real life. Sure, when we hear the name of a place for the first time, let’s use Rivendale as an example, we have no connections to learn from. All we have is a name and then we get the description and the history. The writer here can make this new place whatever they chose, with no baggage attached, but the second we hear anything about this new place we make those connections. Waterfalls make us think of things, mountains and cliffs make us think of things, geography makes us think. Water and grass and trees make us feel differently than lava and rocks and scrub brush. They do this because we associate habitats and biomes with different themes and tones. As readers, we expect certain things from certain settings. Nothing good is going to happen on a craggy rock face hundreds of feet in the air, in the same way that we don’t expect a villain to emerge from a field of dandelions.