More on Landscapes
01/05/2005

I am the only person I know who has a geographical mind. In fact, I have never even heard of anyone else with a geographical mind. Which leaves me in a probable minority of one. It occurs to me that this would be an excellent qualification for insanity, since sanity can be defined as the normal state of mind of the vast majority of people. It's a democratic definition and, as an obvious exception to the norm, I must be some sort of mental aberration, a pustule upon the otherwise pure complexion of humanity.

It's not as if I could do anything about it; after all, a pimple must be a pimple and do things that a pimple does. And I don't worry about it. If everyone else has not discovered the delights of having a geographical mind, that's their problem, not mine. It does have its compensations, believe me.

There is my imagined world, for a start. It began with geography and so is believable in that way beyond anything invented by any other writer of fantasy (as far as I know). As an example, we might take that giant of the fantasy writers, Mr Tolkien. His world begins in linguistics and his care for geography is almost non-existent. So he allows rivers that flow quite happily to and through the only range of hills for miles, mountains that march in straight and orderly lines to form the boundaries of the lands he requires, forests that crop up conveniently where he wants them, sometimes right next to arid scrubland.

Geography just doesn't do that. Rivers flow away from high ground, not towards it. Mountain ranges bulge and wander in contorted shapes. Forests exist where the rainfall is sufficient to support them and only gradually give way to woodland, then grassland and scrubland. Geography detests straight lines and hard edges.

Terry Gilliam shows some understanding of this in the movie Time Bandits, in which great pride is shown by the dwarf responsible for the design of Norway's convoluted coastline. Yet I doubt that Mr Gilliam was guided first by geography in writing his whimsical tale; it is set in the real world and does not create an imaginary one.

My world is based in geography before anything else. A glimpse of the process has been given in my article Okay, I Admit I Had a Childhood. As a child, I saw worlds in puddles after a storm, landscapes in forgotten corners of gardens, mountains and forests in overgrown rockeries. Even now, I cannot look at a textured wall without seeing oceans and plains, lakes and mountain ranges. Our house in Lawton has textured plaster on the walls and so I am surrounded by a landscape in miniature that rivals the lakes of Canada and Finland for complexity and interest.

My invented world makes sense geographically, therefore. It is rooted in the geographical facts of life. Forests grow where the rain falls in abundance, scrubland occurs in the rain shadow of a mountain range (which should tell you immediately that there is such a thing as a prevailing wind in my world), rivers rise in high ground and flow inexorably towards the sea, creating valleys and lowlands as they go. It's not rocket science, after all; geography is perfectly logical.

In my teenage years, I realized that the imagined world contained more than just an interest in geography. It reflected something of my psychology, too. The land began as an island and it was several years before a continent appeared on the horizon. Over the course of time, the island crashed into the continent and became attached by a narrow isthmus. I saw how the island period was an expression of the detached child that I was, not particularly interested in the people around me and much happier when allowed to retreat into my own little world. The appearance of the continent coincided with a time when I began to be more open to the idea of other people, and the eventual joining of the island with the mainland indicated the start of my involvement with the society of others.

It was at this time, too, that the history of the lands I created began to grow. Much of this history developed from my own experiences of friends and events around me. This was then mixed with elements of subjects that interested me so that the final result would be far too complex for a psychologist to unravel and analyze (well, I hope so anyway).

It was with the development of history that characters formed to participate in the stories I found in that world. I cannot say that I invented the people or the stories; they were a necessary result of the earlier evolution of the world. The lands provided their stories and the stories supplied the characters. From about the age of sixteen, my role has been much more that of an observer, rather than a creator. I merely document what springs from the developed world.

It is always apparent to me, however, that it all begins with geography. Had I not been an oddity born with a geographical mind, I doubt that the world in my head would ever have come into being. So I do not curse the fate that made me so strange. Rather, I am grateful.

Clive

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