Favorite Escapes

The setting in a novel is huge. It’s the silent character. Readers may not pay close attention, but without setting, you are literally nowhere.

When I read the last page of a great novel, I often close my eyes and remember the most distinct places the author took me in the book. I want to take a few posts to talk about my favorite escapes in fiction.

I will start with the side of a cliff in A Soldier of the Great War by Marc Helprin. There’s a scene where the protagonist, a professor of aesthetics and a soldier, must climb a cliff using very little equipment. He does not know what he’ll find at the top, but describes the air and the light as it ricochets off the rock from his unique point of view. I almost felt the coolness of the mountain, welcome warmth from the sun on his back and I saw all the scenery around him. I still see it.

Helprin also took us to a WWI foxhole in the same novel. I see dust raining on the soldiers under attack. The low ceiling, everything looks gray, covered with dirt and fear. Men crawled across the unforgiving floor, yelling at one another as the walls crumbled around them. The tension and fear pulse in my gut even when I remember the scene, because the setting is so vivid in my mind.

That’s the beauty of good description. If I can go back to a scene in fiction years after I read the book, the place has become real to me. As real as any other memory.  

This is great fiction.