Should We Read Where We Are?

Travelling without context or links to local stories, histories and traditions can mean everything takes on a predictable familiarity. Places rhyme, depending where you are, bringing repetition and sameness. Of course, local guides and tours help counteract this and reveal more than books, if you can afford them. Analogue travel guides like Lonely Planet or Let’s Go also help and the now endless apps, maps and materials in the age of smart phones also serve as gateways to learning a place better.

Yet there is nothing quite like a good book to bring flesh and bone to a place. On a visit to Florence, The Rise and Fall of The House of Medici by Christopher Hibbert helped make sense of the layers, turning a collection of Renaissance buildings and artworks into something more cohesive. Their story of power and influence wove itself through each visit and exhibition to build a mental model I could understand and temporally bind me to.

Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography was a slow burn read across a couple of years living there, which was critical for understanding a vast city by the Thames which is hard to get to know due to the size and scale of history and the fact I knew it better by tube map than landmark. When you think about it, spatially and factually, such non-fiction is a perfect tool for bringing forth a sharper understanding of a place through knowledge and context. It is kind of the point…

That said, there is something about fiction that goes beyond fact and connects us to the long gone people and times that influenced the places we find ourselves. These stories allow us to dive deep below the surface and beyond what you are meant to notice or collide with. France is a much richer place after reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind or Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovska, which isn’t just the fromage and vin talking…

Even when books do not match a place by setting, they can still weave a powerful impact on our experiences. Irvine Welsh’s Filth, while set in Scotland, captured a bit of the edge around the places I once explored in and around Bangkok. Now that I think about it, I only went to Thailand because of reading Alex Garland’s The Beach in London (which most of us did) and watching the disappointing film (which all of us did). On that same trip, travelling solo through the islands, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London bolstered the day to day vibe, making it memorable without relevance, I suppose.

That was twenty years ago now, and many trips since have more likely been accompanied by airport fiction like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher and Michael Connelly’s Bosch, or maybe Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta, landing like chewing gum for the eyes to get a bit of blood moving now and then while one reclines in the sun and bleeds the mental detritus of work and school and life on to the lounger or wet sand.

This broken thinking emerged in the lead up a recent holiday, and inspired by those memories I packed some fiction related to where we would be spending this time.

While Bali is not exactly Jakarta, Christopher Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously reminded me how good it felt to read something from the place one occupies. The steamy heat of South East Asia, all mad energy and furious industry, tensions between poverty and wealth, hints of unresolved and unspoken colonial history came through as strongly as the smell of incense and clove cigarettes.

Billy Kwan is one of the most well constructed and fascinating characters I’ve encountered in a while and all his complexity and uncertainty is compelling. In fact, all the characters are great, because every one of them is flawed these flaws are amplified by the incessant tropical heat, jealousy, suspicious double talk and competition between journalists doing their jobs in a world largely disappeared now.

This is a novel where the plot, tragic in many ways, is less important than the characters and their relationships to one another. There is a distinct realism, set against the rising tensions leading to a failed coup as one power transfers to another, and all is not what appears. The subtleties are as important as the plainly stated elements, and Koch was masterful here in creating the fragile links between characters forced together by circumstance, most of which is unspoken until the very end.

So, should we read where we are? The answer is yes, for sure. Not only do books furnish a trip and provide useful context and stories, but they also serve as place holders for a journey and for memories to attach themselves to. As we know, books are more than collections of words – they are mirrors, windows and doors and returning to them, an old technology, is a great way of both switching off and connecting to a place.