I have been to Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, Berlin, and a dozen other European cities. I’ve driven through Britain and Ireland, I’ve traversed America and Canada and South America. I’ve seen lions and leopards and other exotic creatures in Botswana and Tanzania; I’ve witnessed erupting volcanoes in Hawaii and New Zealand. I feel at home on the Upper West Side of New York City, and I enjoy a comfortable familiarity with London. Of all the earth’s territories, only Asia is missing on my travel map: I don’t like the heat and, more particularly, heat does not like me. I console myself that I can’t do it all.

I am particularly drawn to cold wilderness landscapes. I have been to Antarctica, Patagonia, Lapland and Iceland. I have trudged through snow-filled environments at -25 degrees Celsius, and have sped through snowy forests and across frozen lakes with my own dog-sled team. In Iceland, I walked across a white isolated undulating plain, surrounded on all sides by low mountains, the smooth crunchy snow unmarked by human or animal; and later on that trip, I stood on a beach covered in fresh snow, the grey stormy Atlantic raging in front of me, and a strip of startling black sand where the waves had washed the snow away. I have walked alone in the silent, shadowless environment of a mid-winter Lapland day feeling an extraordinary peace in that strange, soft-edged land.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I went to Antarctica, it occurred to me that if there were to be a physical landscape that represented the imagination it would be this place. Borderless, untouched, silent, monochrome, with towering mountains and broad sinuous glaciers, its seas covered with sheets of ice and huge icebergs the size of a city blocks.

I have stepped inside the imagination, I thought, over and over again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fiction and travelling are very similar. Both are a journeying into the unknown. Both require curiosity and courage, and both, if they are to be fully explored, require an active imagination. When travelling, you can join a tour or follow a guidebook, or you can wander – at will or whim – entering the current of a place, trusting in yourself even though all is strange and new. But it is precisely because you are in a new and strange place that you are willing to take a risk, for who knows what you will find and what you will see, and how it might change you.

And opening a new novel: you might begin with a vague notion of the story, but basically you enter the narrative, trusting that the author has done the necessary work for your fictional journey. You plunge in without knowing where you are going, but hoping at the end of reading, you’ll be moved and changed by the experience.

The comparison with travelling is equallly relevant when writing a novel. You start the project with a stack of blank pages and a head full of possibility. And you’re nervous too, just like the nerves as you board the plane. You’re heading into the unknown, you’re fearful that the journey might prove just too hard, you can’t conceive of your destination much less being confident that you’ll achieve it. But just with journeying in the real world, you have to trust, and you must have courage, and if things go wrong, if you take the wrong path, even enter the wrong country, you’ll imagine what might have been and you’ll change direction. And if you find yourself again in the wrong place, again you will imagine other possibilities and try another way.

Fiction and travel: I love them both. The one feeds the other, the one inflates and illuminates the other, and both of them are testimony to the power, the pleasure and the pitfalls too of that essential and unique quality of being human, namely, the imagination.

Next stop for me: Shetland.
And the next novel: it has begun…

For those of you in Melbourne, the Writers’ Festival has begun. Shaped around the theme of love there are some very seductive sessions. I am involved in 3 sessions, including an in-conversation with Marieke Hardy – Festival director and very fine friend – Saturday September 7, 10am. I suggest you go to the MWF website and check out the program. It really is a beauty.