Around the World in 80 Novels: A global journey inspired by writers from every continent E-Book

Henry Russell

• Herausgeber: CICO Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 237

Beschreibung

Whether you're a regular globe-trotter or an armchair traveller, these 80 works conjure up the spirit of place for locations on every continent.

Das E-Book Around the World in 80 Novels: A global journey inspired by writers from every continent wird angeboten von CICO Books und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
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Leseprobe

AROUND THE WORLD IN80NOVELS

AROUND THE WORLD IN80NOVELS

A global journey inspired by writers from every continent

HENRY RUSSELL

Published in 2019 by CICO Books

An imprint of Ryland Peters & Small Ltd

20–21 Jockey’s Fields 341 E 116th St

London WC1R 4BW New York, NY 10029

www.rylandpeters.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Text © CICO Books 2019

Design © CICO Books 2019

For picture credits, see page 160.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress and the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 78249 663 2

E-ISBN: 978-1-78879-329-2

Printed in China

Editor: Alison Wormleighton

Designer: Geoff Borin

Art director: Sally Powell

Production controller: Mai-Ling Collyer

Publishing manager: Penny Craig

Publisher: Cindy Richards

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1

United Kingdom AND IRELAND

SCOTLAND

Kidnapped

Death of a Gossip

Knots and Crosses

ENGLAND

Wuthering Heights

Bleak House

Jamaica Inn

White Teeth

WALES

How Green Was My Valley

NORTHERN IRELAND

Cal

IRELAND

Ulysses

The Commitments

Chapter 2

EUROPE

PORTUGAL

The City and the Mountains

SPAIN

For Whom the Bell Tolls

The Shadow of the Wind

FRANCE

Birdsong

After the Circus

Chocolat

NETHERLANDS

A Widow for One Year

The Miniaturist

GERMANY

Goodbye to Berlin

Every Man Dies Alone (Alone in Berlin)

The Reader

SWITZERLAND

Hotel du Lac

AUSTRIA

Vienna Passion

ITALY

The Leopard

My Brilliant Friend

CROATIA

Illyrian Spring

ALBANIA

A Girl in Exile

GREECE

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

The Island

TURKEY

The Towers of Trebizond

Snow

ARMENIA

Forgotten Fire

RUSSIA

The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

Back to Moscow

SWEDEN

Faceless Killers

NORWAY

Death in Oslo

DENMARK/GREENLAND

Smilla’s Sense of Snow (Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow)

Chapter 3

the MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

ISRAEL

To the End of the Land

EGYPT

The Cairo Trilogy

SAUDI ARABIA

The Ruins of Us

IRAN

Savushun: a Novel about Modern Iran

NIGERIA

Half of a Yellow Sun

KENYA

A Grain of Wheat

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

The Poisonwood Bible

BOTSWANA

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

ZIMBABWE

The Grass is Singing

SOUTH AFRICA

A Dry White Season

Chapter 4

ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA

AZERBAIJAN

Ali and Nino

AFGHANISTAN

The Kite Runner

INDIA

Shantaram

The White Tiger

CHINA

The Good Earth

MONGOLIA

The Blue Sky

JAPAN

An Artist of the Floating World

Norwegian Wood

THAILAND

The Beach

VIETNAM

The Sorrow of War

AUSTRALIA

A Town Like Alice

Oscar and Lucinda

NEW ZEALAND

The Luminaries

Chapter 5

NORTH AMERICA

CANADA

The Tenderness of Wolves

A Place Called Winter

USA

The Age of Innocence

The Great Gatsby

Their Eyes Were Watching God

To Kill a Mockingbird

Tales of the City

Indemnity Only

Beloved

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

The Goldfinch

MEXICO

Under the Volcano

Like Water for Chocolate

Chapter 6

CARIBBEAN, CENTRAL, AND SOUTH AMERICA

CUBA

Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

JAMAICA AND DOMINICA

Wide Sargasso Sea

COLOMBIA

One Hundred Years of Solitude

BRAZIL

City of God

PERU

The Time of the Hero

CHILE

The House of the Spirits

Further Reading

Index

Picture Credits

INTRODUCTION

“A first-rate page-turner”... “Powerfully resonant”... “Breathtaking”... “Impossible to recommend too highly”... “An immense achievement”... “Absolutely brilliant”... “Sensuous and thought-provoking”... “Sensitive, daring, deeply moving”... “Vivid, moving, and absorbing”... “Stunning”...

These are just some of the puffs on the covers of the novels featured in this book. They were extracted by their publishers from newspaper and magazine reviews in the hope of increasing sales. But what do they tell potential buyers about the actual content? Nothing. So how can people decide what to read?

If you are contemplating a trip, but not yet sure where you want to go, novels may help you make up your mind – but which ones? Or if you already know where you want to go, which works of prose fiction will increase your understanding and enjoyment of the intended destination? Around the World in 80 Novels suggests some possible answers to these questions.

The choices have been carefully considered, but author and publisher are under no illusion that the list will meet universal approval. There’s no accounting for taste, and arguments about what’s good in the arts—perhaps including a certain amount of controversy—are no bad things.

At the planning stage we considered doing one book per country, but soon found that unsatisfactory. Therefore some countries have several entries, while many have only a single representative. The United States has nine while Canada and Russia, though much larger, have only two each. Perhaps that seems a bit arbitrary, but we reasoned that the sparsely populated belt that goes most of the way around the Earth between the 49th and 75th parallels has less variety—and indeed is the setting for fewer novels—than the contiguous 48.

Although deciding what countries to include was a problem, agreeing on which books to omit was an even bigger headache. Many great novels with a strong sense of place—Don Quixote; The Sorrows of Young Werther; War and Peace; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—didn’t make the cut, either because they’re too well known already or because any edition with larger than microscopic print will take up too much room in the carry-on baggage. That said, we admit there’s some inconsistency here—several of the chosen works are big—but decisions had to be made. We can only hope that you approve.

Some of the featured works describe their settings in minute detail. Patrick Modiano’s Paris is laid out with satnav-like precision. Daphne du Maurier and Zora Neale Hurston wrote guidebooks to the locations that inspired them (Cornwall and Florida, respectively), and that expertise informs their fiction.

Other choices are short on topography but capture the spirit of their nation. In placing An Artist of the Floating World in a generic setting that might be anywhere in Japan, Kazuo Ishiguro deftly evokes the whole of the country. The French village in Chocolat is a product of Joanne Harris’s imagination, but plenty of her readers think that they’ve been to it—indeed, that they’ve stayed there; her novel is in some ways plus français que la France. Isabel Allende is coy about the setting for The House of the Spirits—she claims it could be any country in South America—but it’s hard to imagine that anyone who’d read about or visited Chile would not recognize it in her masterpiece.

Some of the books are set in times gone by, but that doesn’t reduce their relevance to the modern visitor. The past is in the present whenever we think about it, and in many places it’s impossible to prevent it from springing to mind: all over Flanders and northern France, World War 1 is memorialized more than a century after the conflict ended, and the sense of history that pervades the region is captured in Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong. For any visitor to Vietnam seeking historical context, Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War should be considered essential reading.

Several books in the following pages make the places they describe seem idyllic: for example, Croatia in Ann Bridge’s Illyrian Spring, and Botswana in Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. More often, however, there is danger abroad, especially in the thrillers, yet fictional evil does nothing to deter bookish visitors—if anything, it attracts them to the place. In making Ystad the setting for his murder mysteries, Henning Mankell turned a small Swedish port into a noted tourist center. Similarly, the critical acclaim accorded Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird transformed its setting, a rural Southern US backwater, into “the Literary Capital of Alabama.”

CITY OF GOD

It is hoped that every book featured here will crank up the reader’s wanderlust.

Inspired, of course, by Around the World in 80 Days, we take in the countries visited by Phileas Fogg—France, Italy, Egypt, India, China, Japan, the United States, and Ireland—as well as England, Fogg’s start and end point, and dozens of other nations, some of which didn’t exist when Jules Verne’s novel was published in 1873.

Henry Russell

London, 2019

The author thanks Meredith Jones Russell for her help with Russian matters.

chapter 1

united kingdom and ireland

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

CAL

JAMAICA INN

DEATH OF A GOSSIP

SCOTLAND

KIDNAPPED (1886)

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Kidnapped first appeared in serial form in Young Folks, a children’s weekly magazine. The work was well received by reviewers at the time, but some later critics deprecated it as no more than an adolescent tale of derring-do. In their view, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) was the weakest of the three Titans of Scottish literature, scarcely worthy of mention in the same breath as Robert Burns and Walter Scott.

Republished as a novel, Kidnapped has never been out of print and is now firmly established in the pantheon. Readers who demand seriousness have come to see the work as a study of the nature of honor. Those who seek a realistic context are satisfied that the fiction is woven around a historical event: the 1752 Appin Murder of Colin Campbell, nicknamed the Red Fox, an agent sent by the English king, George II, to extract revenue from the Scots after their defeat at the Battle of Culloden (1746).

But those who count readability among the loftiest literary virtues have always rated Stevenson highly. Although Kidnapped contains words and phrases unfamiliar outside Scotland (but not too many, as the work’s original editor demanded), no idiom or vocabulary is so arcane as to distract from the rapidly unfolding drama.

The action begins when the hero, 17-year-old David Balfour, sets out into the world after the death of his parents. He walks from his family home in the Scottish Lowlands to Edinburgh, there to meet his uncle for the first time—his expectations of this encounter do not include the attempt on his life that follows. It fails but the wicked old man then tricks his nephew onto the Covenant, a ship bound for North America, where, it is intended, David will be sold into slavery.

As the vessel sails around the north of Scotland, bound for the Atlantic, it accidentally hits a smaller vessel and rescues the sole survivor, Alan Breck, a boastful and dandyish but brave and noble Scotsman in French uniform.

On learning that the Covenant’s captain and crew plan to rob their new passenger, David and Alan form an alliance. After a mortal onboard struggle the ship is driven aground and the pair escape onto Erraid, a small island off the western edge of Mull.

Stevenson’s prose is unflagging in its pace and unfailingly evocative of the terrain: “Now we ran among the birches; now stooping behind low humps upon the mountain-side; now crawling on all fours among the heather…” It’s a warts-and-all depiction, though—he even mentions midges, the bane of many Scottish summers.

David Balfour’s subsequent route back to Edinburgh has since become known as the Stevenson Way—230 miles (370km) across the still-wild heart of central Scotland. It’s not signposted, partly because the original text is vague about the exact itinerary, but with a good map the broad outline is easy to follow: eastward from Erraid, through Morvern, across Loch Linnhe to Ballachulish, through Glencoe into the Rannoch Moor wilderness, and thence to the slopes of Ben Alder; then south to Loch Rannoch, through the mountains above Bridge of Orchy to Crianlarich, over the mountains to Loch Voil and Balquhidder, then to Callander, Dunblane, Stirling, and Limekilns, and finally across the Firth of Forth to the Scottish capital. David and Alan parted company on Edinburgh’s Corstorphine Hill, and since 2004 there has been a statue of them nearby.

Here at Bridge of Orchy, the Stevenson Way (which runs roughly west–east from the small island of Erraid, just off the Isle of Mull, to Edinburgh) intersects the West Highland Way (running north–south between Milngavie and Fort William).

SCOTLAND

DEATH OF A GOSSIP (1985)

M. C. BEATON

This is the first in what became a series of more than 30 lighthearted detective stories by M. C. Beaton, one of the pen names of Scottish author Marion Chesney (b. 1936). Chesney has also written romance novels under the names Sarah Chester, Helen Crampton, Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, and Charlotte Ward.

Death of a Gossip is set in the fictional Highland village of Lochdubh. Eight people enroll on a course at the local School of Casting to learn how to fish for the trout and salmon that thrive in the local waters. Seven of these students have guilty secrets while the eighth, Lady Jane Withers, is a nasty newspaper gossip columnist hell-bent on exposing the others’ dirty linen to public scrutiny. It is no surprise to any—and a relief to some— of them when this muck-raking writer turns up dead; she has been murdered.

On the trail of the killer goes Hamish Macbeth, the local bobby whose most readily apparent characteristics are indolence and an overwhelming desire to avoid promotion. Although his investigative methods are idiosyncratic and sometimes eccentric, he turns out to be something of a super-sleuth who cracks the case with the help of his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Halburton-Smythe. (Whether these two will ever marry becomes a running theme in subsequent books.) The only person who doesn’t think highly of Hamish’s abilities is his direct superior and would-be nemesis, Chief Inspector Blair from police headquarters in the nearby town of Strathbane (also fictional). The two officers come into regular conflict, and the constable outwits the top brass every time.

Based on some of the Beaton novels, Hamish Macbeth was a version for television (three series, a total of 20 episodes) that ran from 1995 to 1997. It was written by Daniel Boyle and starred Robert Carlyle. Much of the location filming was in Plockton, a stunningly beautiful village on the shores of Loch Carron with a station on the scenic “Kyle Line” (the Inverness–Kyle of Lochalsh railway). Now a popular site of pilgrimage for fans of the series, Plockton markets itself as “the Jewel of the Highlands.”

Agatha Raisin

The prolific Marion Chesney, again writing as “M. C. Beaton,” is also the author of more than 20 novels of which the heroine is a retired public relations officer turned amateur sleuth who solves crime in England’s Cotswolds area. Agatha Raisin, an eight-part television series based on some of these books, was broadcast in 2015 and starred Ashley Jensen in the title role.

As this book went to press, a second series had reportedly been commissioned and was starting production.

Now most famous as the location for the television series Hamish Macbeth, Plockton had appeared on screen before, notably in the 1973 horror film The Wicker Man.

SCOTLAND

KNOTS AND CROSSES (1987)

IAN RANKIN

The Edinburgh of this novel is a dark city thrown into panic by a serial killer who targets young girls. One of the detectives assigned to the case is John Rebus, who is ex-SAS (Special Air Service, the British army’s commando force), divorced and tormented by his past. He has a teenage daughter and a brother who is a drug dealer. Among the other significant characters are Gill Templer— John’s girlfriend and a fellow police officer—and Jim Stevens, a boozy newspaper reporter.

Unlike many Edinburgh pubs, The Oxford Bar has not been modernized: a deliberate decision by the owners to keep it as described in the Rebus novels.

The general gloom of the setting is intensified by the protagonist himself: saturnine, sarcastic, fatalistic, and psychologically damaged, John Rebus comes under suspicion of committing the crimes he’s investigating. He is an ambivalent, potentially sinister figure. Ian Rankin (b. 1960) later stated that part of his inspiration for Knots and Crosses was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), a work he admired but felt should have been set in the Scottish rather than the English capital because it was based on a “real-life Edinburgh character… who was gentleman by day, criminal by night.” (He was referring to Deacon William Brodie, a diurnal cabinetmaker and city councilor who was hanged in 1788 for his nocturnal activities as a house burglar.)

At first Rankin had no intention of writing detective fiction—indeed, he claims he didn’t know that Knots and Crosses was even of that genre—but this novel, though largely unnoticed on first publication, gradually grew in popularity and spawned more than 20 sequels and a television series. In Exit Music (2007), Rebus reached 60, retirement age in the police force, and many people assumed that was the last of the series, but there have since been five further volumes to date, most recently In a House of Lies (2018).

In his introduction to the 2005 edition of Knots and Crosses, Rankin remarked that the Edinburgh he described in the book “no longer exists.” But that’s only partially true. Some of the locations in the novels are invented, others are fictional conflations of more than one place, and a few have since closed—yet a number of places are the same today as they appear in the books. The unintended consequence has been a burgeoning Rebus tour industry.

Near the beginning of Knots and Crosses, Rebus and his colleague Jack Morton go out to drown their sorrows. Rankin writes, “They drank in some of Edinburgh’s seedier bars, bars the tourist never sees.” That’s no longer the case. Among the highlights of the many trips now on offer around the Scottish capital are Rebus’s tenement building at 24 Arden Street, The Oxford Bar in Young Street, and the Police Station at 14 St Leonard’s Street.

NAMING OF PARTS

Not everyone approves of literary labels, but those who think they’re useful have lumped all modern Scottish crime writers who may plausibly be described as “gritty” into a genre called Tartan Noir. The earliest novel to which this term has been applied is Laidlaw (1977) by William McIlvanney, which is set in Glasgow. Knots and Crosses is widely held to be the second in line. The crime fiction of Val McDermid may also be categorized as Tartan Noir.

This mural outside the tavern on Edinburgh’s Lawnmarket commemorates Deacon William Brodie, the real-life hero–villain who Rankin once suggested could have been the inspiration for Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which in turn had partly inspired Knots and Crosses.

ENGLAND

WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1847)

EMILY BRONTë

This extraordinary novel that combines Gothic horror with Victorian social realism is set in the heart of Yorkshire and has become a universally recognized emblem of the wildest parts of that great English county.

A complex story of the power of love in both its destructive and regenerative forms, it all stems from the time when old Mr Earnshaw brought home to his manor house, Wuthering Heights, a young waif he’d found wandering the streets of Liverpool. This dark, brooding presence, whom his adoptive father names Heathcliff, has a big impact on Earnshaw’s own children: his son Hindley sees a rival for his parents’ attention; his daughter Catherine falls madly in love with the newcomer, who is roughly the same age as she. The rest of the narrative charts the enduring consequences of the introduction of this cuckoo into the nest.

BRONTë PARSONAGE MUSEUM

Haworth is a magnet for fans of Emily Brontë and her novelist sisters: Charlotte, author of Jane Eyre (1847), and Anne, author of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). The most important site in the town is the parsonage, where the family lived because their widowed father was the vicar of Haworth Church. The parsonage was where the sisters wrote their great works, and it is where their furniture, clothes, and possessions remain in place and on display to this day.

The setting is the landscape that Emily Brontë (1818–48) knew well: fictionalized versions of the countryside around Cowan Bridge, where she lived for a short time as a child; of the Shibden Valley where she worked as a schoolteacher; and— most strikingly—of the terrain around Haworth, the town in which she spent the greater part of her life, which most commentators agree is near her imagined location of Wuthering Heights.

Prominent throughout this novel are the Yorkshire moors—wild lands that defy cultivation because they are either too dry or, as mainly here, too wet. All that grows there is heather. They have no fixed landmarks; it is easy to lose your way on them, and if you wander off the beaten track, there is always the danger of sinking into a bog and drowning.

Emily Brontë’s most frequently quoted description of the moors occurs in the final paragraph of Wuthering Heights (“I lingered around them under that benign sky…” which is reproduced in almost every book of literary criticism and many quotation anthologies). However, similar passages occur throughout the book, as in the following quotation:

“...the whole hill-back was one billowy, white ocean; the swells and falls not indicating corresponding rises and depressions in the ground: many pits, at least, were filled to a level; and entire ranges of mounds, the refuse of quarries’ on one side of the road, at intervals of six or seven yards, a line of upright stones, continued through the whole length of the barren: these were erected, and daubed with lime on purpose to serve as guides in the dark; and also when a fall, like the present, confounded the deep swamps on either hand with the firmer path...”

The remains of Top Withens, thought to be the inspiration for the Earnshaw home, look ominous even on the nicest days.

Of course, the landscape has a figurative significance—it mirrors the emotions of the main characters, and its wildness reflects both Heathcliff’s character and Catherine’s passion for him—but what Emily Brontë describes is also what she saw, and what the visitor to Haworth and environs may still experience today.

HOUSE OF INSPIRATION

A not-too-difficult 1½ mile (2.5km) walk westward from the Parsonage leads to Top Withens, a farm that is widely supposed to have been the model for the Earnshaw family home.

HERITAGE TRANSPORT

Although Haworth is easily accessible by road, it can also be reached at a leisurely pace by steam train on the preserved Keighley and Worth Valley Railway. This line links with the national rail network at Keighley station on the Airedale Line between Leeds and Skipton.

ENGLAND

BLEAK HOUSE (1853)

CHARLES DICKENS

It may seem odd that a novel published in 1853 should continue to shape the expectations of first-time visitors to London. That it remains the case is attributable mainly to the descriptive power of Charles Dickens (1812–70). However, it is also partly because throughout the Cold War (c. 1945–89) Victorian works were some of the most recent English literature that people in the Communist bloc were permitted to read. Even a generation after the Iron Curtain was demolished, censorship still casts an influential shadow.

Bleak House is principally (but by no means exclusively) a satire of the law’s delay: all the characters depicted are in some way involved in a dispute about a will that has spiraled into a case of such complexity and duration (“Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers”) that no one any longer knows what the case is really all about. (And in the not entirely unexpected dénouement, when the litigation is finally resolved, all the vast inheritance turns out to have been spent on professional fees.)

The part of the English capital in which the main action of the novel takes place—an area bounded on the south by the Strand, on the north by High Holborn, on the west by Kingsway, and on the east by Chancery Lane—is still today much as it was in the 19th century, although the district’s most famous buildings, the Royal Courts of Justice, were not completed until 1882, 12 years after the author’s death.

The work opens with a description of London rain that creates a sea of mud and “a general infection of ill temper” among the citizens as they jostle along the streets, banging their open umbrellas. There is fog everywhere. After Esther Summerson (one of two narrators; the other is an omniscient voice) first entered the capital, she noted that “the streets were so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen.” When she asked about it she was told, “This is a London particular.”

And indeed it was: the depiction is grounded in reality. Ever since the 13th century, London had been notorious for its fogs, which hung heavy over the city and surrounding marshlands in the valley of the River Thames. After the Industrial Revolution, these clouds were thickened by smoke from factories to create smog that could reduce the horizon to the end of one’s nose and that caused, particularly in winter, innumerable respiratory ailments. What became known as “pea soupers” enveloped London for at least a few days almost every year from Dickens’s time until the mid-20th century. In 1952, a particularly bad occurrence caused the deaths of 10,000 people. Then government legislation, starting with the Clean Air Act of 1956, forced a reduction in open coal fires, though this was insufficient to prevent another smog in December 1962. Since then, London has become one of the world’s cleaner major cities, but its reputation as a smog bowl has persisted. This has been reinforced in enduring films, particularly some of those about Jack the Ripper, of which Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927) was an influential example.

What may sometimes be overlooked is that in Bleak House Dickens was conscripting the weather for figurative purposes: the mud is messy and the fog impenetrable, just like the lawsuit in the book, referred to as Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Bleak House evokes London but it is no Baedeker-like description—the city has always had sunny intervals.

On High Holborn in London, the Tudor building known as Staple Inn is the last surviving Inn of Chancery. Originally attached to London’s four Inns of Court and used as offices for the Clerks of Chancery, the Inns of Chancery had by Dickens’s time become, in effect, just glorified dining clubs for the legal subculture satirized in Bleak House.

ENGLAND

JAMAICA INN (1936)

DAPHNE DU MAURIER

At the southwestern extremity of mainland Britain, surrounded on all but one side by sea, Cornwall has long been a law unto itself—and sometimes lawless, too. Its criminal practices are what Daphne du Maurier (1907–89) highlights in this enduringly popular work.

The setting is Bodmin Moor, in the center of Cornwall. At the heart of this windswept, barren heathland of around 80 square miles (200 sq km) is the real-life hotel of the title, where du Maurier stayed in 1930. In the novel, which is set in the early 19th century, it is run by Joss Merlyn and his wife Patience. When the heroine, Mary Yellan, comes to live with this couple after the death of her mother, Patience’s sister, she soon discovers that the place does not make its money in the way one might expect, from travelers on the main east–west highway beside which it stands. Instead, its income comes from clandestine nocturnal activities that Joss—a strong, angry, violent drunk—is insistent Mary should keep her nose out of.

INN ’FLUENCE

In the book, honest, God-fearing travelers hurry past Jamaica Inn because they know or feel it’s an evil place—the best advice to them is “Cross your heart and spur your horse.” Nothing could be farther from the modern reality. The hotel thrives on its associations with the bestseller itself and the film and TV versions of it, especially the 1939 movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The real-life premises have a du Maurier room, which contains the author’s writing desk and other du Maurier memorabilia; a museum housing smuggling artifacts; Haunted Rooms in which you can stay; ghost hunts; and monthly Murder Mystery evenings.

But Mary is curious, and even if she weren’t, it would be hard not to notice some of the goings-on. She soon concludes that the stock-in-trade of Jamaica Inn is smuggling, and up to a point she is right, but she later learns that what is going on is even worse than she has suspected.