I spent days on my fantasy islands, some as vast as Australia, others as small as Rockall. My job was simply to summon one up to the surface with my Berol felt-tip pens. I ran my fingertips over the pristine expanses of parchment-thick paper, drooling over its infinity of possible archipelagos. This time, I asked my mum for an A1 sheet of thick cartridge paper, mounted with masking tape onto one of her heavy artist’s drawing boards. I could just feel how amazing this book was going to be! All I had to do to get started was draw the map. (Even that word is shifty and enchanted, sometimes pronounced “archie-pelago” and sometimes “arky-pelago,” even by the same person.) Wizards, epic voyages, underground labyrinths, talking dragons, languages, rings of power, cosmopolitan ports, primitive societies toward the edges. My literary début was now going to be set in a vast, planet-size fantasy archipelago. Not long after, I borrowed Ursula Le Guin’s “ Earthsea” books from the hallowed Great Malvern Library. I’m sure I managed at least half a page of the novel before I got distracted.
I spent hours on that map, plotting the otters’ progress with a dotted red line and enjoying how nonchalant I’d be at school the day after my unprecedented Booker Prize victory. What about toponyms, though? Should I use existing human names, or make up Otterese words for places like Worcester or Upton-upon-Severn? Would otters have words for motorways or factories or bridges? Why would they? Why wouldn’t they? Never mind, I’ll sort that out later. Along the looping river, I drew woods, hills, and marshes in the style of the maps in “The Lord of the Rings”: blobs with sticks for trees, bumps for hills, and tufts for marshes. So I traced the course of the River Severn from my dad’s road atlas onto Sellotaped-together sheets of A4.
Basking in its afterglow, I plotted an epic novel about a small group of fugitive otters-one of whom was clairvoyant-who get driven from their home by the ravages of building work, and swim up the River Severn to its source, in Wales, where they establish an egalitarian community called Ottertopia.Īs any child author can testify, you can’t begin until you’ve got the map right. The book that first set me on my way was “ Watership Down,” by Richard Adams. Photograph Courtesy The Dean and Chapter of Hereford Cathedral / The Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust I like to go visit the medieval Mappa Mundi when I can, not only to mingle with my past and future selves but also to study the map with my freshly older mind.
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