A novel can make you feel as if you know a city, whether it's Oxford,London, Paris or Rome. Anna Carey draws a fictional map
Books happen in other places for the Irish. Most of us grow up reading more of the literature of other countries than of our own, and perhaps more than most reading nations we first experience other countries in books.
We know London through everyone from Charles Dickens to Helen Fielding; we know Paris from Colette, Émile Zola and Ernest Hemingway. We know New York through Edith Wharton and Bret Easton Ellis; we know San Francisco through Armistead Maupin; we know Florence through E. M. Forster and India through Salman Rushdie.
If you want an introduction to a city, why not throw out the Rough Guide (okay, keep it for hotels and bus routes) and pick up a Penguin? Novels make strange places familiar. Oxford feels like an old friend to anyone who has read the myriad novels set there, from Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson to Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, from Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night to Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse mysteries. In addition to its own enormous charm and beauty, Oxford is worth visiting for any book lover if only to be able to walk past Magdalen College and realise it is the alma mater of Bertie Wooster. Joyce- loving visitors to Dublin probably feel the same way about the stopping points of Leopold Bloom (those that haven't been knocked down or rebuilt, anyway).
Novels can be practical travel guides, too, as I discovered when I first visited London with my family when I was 17. We stayed in an apartment belonging to friends of my parents on Cromwell Road in Kensington. My sisters and I were dying to visit the clothing exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum and declared to our initially sceptical parents that it was within walking distance of the flat.
We knew this because one of our favourite fictional clans, the Fossil family from Noel Streatfeild's children's classic Ballet Shoes, lived on Cromwell Road, and on fine days they always walked to the V&A to look at the dolls' houses. And so did we.
There is another slightly geeky reason to take certain novels on holiday, of course: the thrill of reading a book in the place where it's set. Suddenly you are at the heart of the action; you see what the characters see, you walk the same streets and breathe the same scented air. When Johann Goethe spent his own last night in the eternal city reading Ovid's ode to his final night in Rome on the ruins of the Colosseum, he was doing what many of us have done. Although anyone who studied the poem when it was a set text for Inter Cert Latin might not feel so romantically about it.
Other books, however, are more encouraging of on-site reading. Where better to read A Tale Of Two Cities, Dickens's glorious account of the French Revolution, than Paris? And while you're there you can calm down and read one of Colette's sensual evocations of the Parisian demi-monde.
A Greek beach holiday can attain epic proportions if you read one of many excellent translations of The Odyssey or, even better, settle down with a collection of Greek myths and look at the same landscape as Orpheus or Persephone. Travellers to the Loire Valley might take along William Maxwell's exquisite The Château, the story of two US tourists in post-war France, and follow in their footsteps.
The greatest charm of books to the would-be traveller, however, is the way they entice you to their locations. Even before you've told your boss you want time off work, let alone booked your flights, books make you want to go to places.
Maupin's Tales Of The City sequence, which he wrote during the late 1970s and early 1980s, must have lured thousands of readers by now to the bright lights of San Francisco, which he depicted as a debauched but warm-hearted city where just about everyone could feel at home. In a just world every copy of A Room With A View, Forster's luminous account of a young woman's trip to Florence and its effect on the rest of her life, would come with a free plane ticket to Tuscany. And if you can make it to the end of A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth's Indian epic, without wanting to jump on the next plane to India then you must really have disagreed with Lata's choice of suitable marriage partner.
Anyone who doubts the strength of people's desire to track the footsteps of their fictional heroes should look at Prince Edward Island, the scenic corner of Canada where L. M. Montgomery set Anne Of Green Gables, as well as most of her other novels.
Every year tens of thousands of tourists descend on the town, many from Japan, where the books are enormously popular. The most devoted fans dress up as their red-haired idol; some even get married in Montgomery's former home. Recent newly-weds include a famed sumo wrestler who said it had long been his dream to visit Anne's home town. An indication that if travel agencies want to improve business they might want to expand into bookselling.
