Setting as a main character

inspired by a Goodreads article

I shared this Goodreads article this morning with the Literary & Commercial Fiction group on London Writers’ Salon that I co-host with my talented friend

Jayne Marshall

and it made me think of the books I have read where the setting is so everpresent that it could or should be considered another main character. It has main character energy, if you like.

The first one that jumped out of my head was The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis. It’s set in 80s LA, and in itself that could be hinted at in passing, but Ellis takes you along the drives that the characters take, naming streets, describing landmarks along the way, so much so that if you know LA, you can see exactly where they are in your mind. Most fiction doesn’t embed the landscape quite as fully as this, maybe they hint at areas, there are sparse mentions of landmarks, but here you could plot the story out on a map, tailing them in a car just behind, looking out the windows as the story narrates the landscape.

In 1989, I spent the summer with family in Camarillo, fifty-two miles up the 101 from downtown LA, but to me, visiting from Scotland, it was LA, because it all blended together. Parts of the routes Ellis describes in The Shards are places I remember, and it dusts off those distant memories, calling to mind the sights, sounds and smells that those memories hung on. The never-ending sunshine, the dry heat, the gardens only possible with constantly running sprinklers.

To me, LA and its surroundings has definite main character energy. And it needs to, as this is more a work of auto-fiction, blending some of Ellis’ teenage years into the mix.

When I think of other books, I think in terms of the setting that I see in my mind, whether the mountain communities of the southern Appalachians in Demon Copperhead, the small town in Mississippi that Percival Everett describes in The Trees, the unmistakeable Glasgow in the 80s of Shuggie Bain. And very often those settings are an intrinsic part of the writing.

I am going to pull out some of my American literature and check where they are set, and map my own roadtrip to see where I have read myself. I have always wanted to do a US roadtrip, hire a huge Winnebago and set off to explore the changing landscapes, until then I make do with reading my way around.

What have you read that has a setting that has definite main character energy? Where have you read round the States or other countries?

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I couldn’t picture how much weight I’ve lost, so I decided to google a comparison. It’s a weird thing losing weight as if you were told to then hold that weight and carry it around with you for a day, there's no way you would manage. When I googled this comparison, I actually wondered if I could even lift any of these.

I have lost the equivalent of a Dalmatian. Or a Golden Retriever. A German Short-Haired Pointer. A Hungarian Vizsla. Or a 50 inch TV, if you’re not a dog person.

Reading that, I felt so appalled. How did I get that big? Then I quickly googled the amount left that I want to lose.

A Beagle (how apt). A Cocker Spaniel. Or a Staffy. Or a standard sized microwave.

It’s inconceivable, and yet them’s the facts, folks.

I keep eyeing dogs out on walks now and thinking “yep, I used to carry one of you around, strapped across my body”. I saw a large staffy yesterday and wondered how he fit around my shrinking frame still. I poked at my soft belly, grabbed at my flabby thighs, wobbled the loose arm fat and thought “yep, there you are you stubborn little staffy”.

A few more months and he’ll be gone too. All the dogs I’ve rehomed along my weight loss journey.