from The Book Show – interview with John Mullan
Ramona Koval: There’s so many things in this book that I wanted to talk to you about. You say that the British novel took a long time to discover a sense of place, and the discovery of weather in the novel only happened in the 19th century. What was going on?
John Mullan: Both those things, if you read novels, I think the sense of place…if you read novels until the early 19th century, apart from London and occasionally Bath (these are the two places you go to in 18th century novels which are distinct), all the other places are sort of generic places; there’s the countryside, there’s the open road and there are inns where you stop and every inn is just like every other inn, and every village is just a sort of general English village.
And then in the early 19th century, the person who really did it actually was Walter Scott, and he made Lowland Scotland and Edinburgh a kind of place that people right the way throughout Europe thought that they knew. It was picturesque and it was romantic and it was associated with legends and ruins and old stories, and his novels were full of old stories, and he made at least part of Scotland a place that in the imagination readers could be tourists of, almost. So before, more famously at the end of the 19th century, Thomas Hardy did that for Wessex, before Scott the idea that particular places apart from London could live in the imagination wasn’t something novelists thought of.
After Scott, the sense of place became something that novelists routinely did and now we expect it, almost. We expect it as something that novelists are careful about, getting their setting right. And equally weather. I think it was Jane Austen who discovered weather, really. Until she came along, occasionally in novels when somebody has to take shelter there’s a big storm, but the sense that novelists are the kind of people who notice the small details of ordinary life didn’t include doing the weather. Jane Austen…one of the many ways in which she…she’s thought of as rather a staid writer but in fact she’s incredibly innovative, I think, and one of the many little things she did was she discovered how a novelist could use the weather in their plot.
Over and over again it happens, and I’ll mention one small example; at the end of what I think is her greatest novel, one of the greatest novels ever, Emma, there’s a scene where Emma and Mr Knightly basically declare their love for each other. This is the climax of the novel, a climax of a novel which was full of misunderstandings and people not saying what they really feel. They do this because the weather suddenly changes. They’re going to take a walk around the garden and the weather looks inclement so they’re not going to do it, and you’re led to understand by the narrative that if they hadn’t taken this walk round the garden, if the weather hadn’t suddenly cleared up, they wouldn’t have been able to have this conversation, and it’s actually quite possible that they would have gone on feeling these things for each other and yet not declaring them and you wouldn’t have had the happy ending. It’s as if suddenly, miraculously the clouds, on a typical English day, clear away, the sun comes out, we’ll go for the walk, we’ll have the happy ending.
