Novel geographies of the Great North Road in C. E. Montague’s ‘Right Off the Map’ (1927) and Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘To the North’ (1932)

mental map of the Great North Road, included by Peter Gould and Rodney White in 'Mental Maps' (1974)
In 1927, the Great North Road underwent significant changes, with the new Barnet and Hatfield bypasses opening that year. The same year was also the beginning of the twentieth century’s long-lasting fall in train ticket sales, so 1927 is often described as the year that the road overtook the railway. It is also the date of the publication of the novel Right Off the Map, by C. E. Montague, which tells the story of a military campaign by a rogue troop of soldiers in the fantastical country of Ria. To get things straight: this book is not set in England, and doesn’t make any mention of cars or driving, so it might seem an odd choice for this paper. But I hope to show the imaginative influence upon it of the novelty of the Great North Road; the second half of the paper will follow this theme in a much more explicitly related novel, Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North. My aim is to show what happens when you shift the boundaries of geographical possibility, and the creative potential that has for literature.
The Barnet and Hatfield bypasses were the first deliberate and major redesigns of the GNR. Its original route, devised by the Ministry of Transport in 1921, was already over a hundred miles long from St. Paul’s Cathedral in central London north to Colsterworth. But it was the 1927 adaptations which brought it much closer to the modern road we know, in terms of convenient long distance travel, and meant it represented a brand new speedier link, or way of collapsing the distance, between London and England north of London.
The new GNR was an anomaly in two ways. Firstly, its increasingly popular use, in favour of the train, meant that new areas of the landscape of Britain were opened up to often urban travellers, locations which would once have been in the margins of a train-dominated landscape. Echoing this novelty, C. E. Montague’s novel is set in an England-like land where a troop of ‘born townsmen without any boots to speak of’ are sent on a military mission towards some rather hyperbolic glaciers, at the end of a mighty ridge that runs North and South across the country. While the rest of the army are boarding trains to reach the battlefield along the expected route, it is the men of this small troop who, by taking bypasses through the mountains and thus travelling a new and speedier road north to plan a surprise attack, discover some of the unmapped and unexplored recesses of their own country.
Secondly, the Great North Road is at this stage in the twentieth century an anomaly in terms of visual landscape. It is the forerunner of the motorway, but in a time before motorways, and so novel in appearance, it seems to lead into another country entirely, which is the inspiration for the surreal final chapter in To the North, in which Emmeline and Markie, driving up the Great North Road at an incredible speed, have a fatal crash, while experiencing the sensation that they are approaching the Arctic north pole itself.
This short paper therefore intends to demonstrate how, in the case of both novels, the surreal landscapes in which the action takes place are a textual exploration of what happens when a new form of mobility alters the foundations of the map, and it becomes harder to get a purchase on one’s environment. These two works of speculative fiction are about the contemporary sense the GNR provided of being a place which was ‘off the map’, or at the very least, not yet included as part of the established map. I will explore how the GNR created a Britain in which maps were, at least momentarily, obsolete: both writers made use of this opportunity to write books in which the characters do not yet know how to orient themselves in the new environment they find (or more accurately, lose) themselves in.
‘We’re a lost legion, my boy’: Right Off the Map
With the popularisation of the new roads, the landscape was no longer train-centric; the concept of ‘off the beaten track’ was also completely changed by the subsequent reformatting of highways and byways (highways being coated with a new slate-coloured tarmac, and byways remaining a dusty yellow). The maps and guidebooks to travel around Britain, however, were slow to adjust to this redefinition of the countryside in terms of new mobility. Old habits die hard; E. V. Lucas, for instance, barefacedly admits in the preface to the 1935 edition of Highways and Byways in Sussex to reiterating the itinerary from the 1903 edition, in which the various centres in the book were chosen and arranged according to the then dominant rail system.
With motor cars, motor buses and motor charabancs came the need for new arterial roads and by-passes, thus also changing the maps and popularising parts of the country remote from railways.
Since, when I was preparing this book, the railway was still the most convenient means of transit, I arranged the various centres according to that system, explaining in the preface why Midhurst was chosen as the opening spot. Now that the road has beaten the rail, the explorer needs no such assistance: but, motorists being so swift and mobile, I have left the itinerary much as it was.[1]
The approach to the organisation of this, like many, guidebooks, had thus changed little, where the use of the landscape itself had changed massively. It was still some time, in fact, before a mapping process designed to record the road system comprehensively, the Post-War Ordnance Survey, was to be put into operation and celebrated for ‘making Britain the best-mapped country in the world’. Until then, the off-piste or remote areas which were now made available to drivers by the new, speedy and convenient GNR were still seemingly alien spaces.
The same year that this change to the road facilitated travel from London across the country, C. E. Montague’s surrealist portrait of Ria depicts a capital city immersed in meadows ‘rather like those of Sussex’, but with strange regions to the North and South ranging ‘through half the world’s climates, almost from Arctic to tropic’, New Worlds now laid open for emigrant Englishmen to invade. When the small troop of urban soldiers take cover in a valley which runs out to the West ‘from the mightier chain that ran North and South’ across Ria, the character Willan refers to it as ‘the one that’s marked ‘Lost Valley (no information)’ on these inexpressibly bloody Staff maps’[2], a clear nod to the inadequate adjustment of mapping techniques to auto-mobility in Britain.
This is a bizarre country, where the entire land is on a ‘long slant’ marked by the ‘straight groove’ leading North (p. 34), and is full of blind spots on the map. From the city itself, most of the country is in fact a blind spot, for the lay of the land means that citizens cannot see anything over the horizon except for the great iced peaks at the other end of the country:
You cannot see from the City the actual sky-line of any of these dips. Something gets in the way. It is as if a broad screen, with a level top, had been placed in front of the whole range, with only the upper three thousand feet of the range sticking up above the top of the screen. This is because the Big Slope of Ria rises more steeply for the first fifty miles East of the City than do the beds of the deep mountain valleys above – each about thirty miles long – which lead up to those dips, nicks or passes. These relatively flat-bottomed valleys are as completely out of your sight as is the upper surface of a shelf eight feet high when you stand on the floor. For working purposes your horizon line is the level of the ground at the lower end of these valleys, where they debouch upon the Big Slope, though behind the horizon you do see that chain of white spires.
… When the wind is uneasy, and much cloud about, the mouth of one of these invisible valleys … will appear to be constantly sucking in or disgorging soft bulks of a vaporous blackness that shifts, mantles, seethes, wreathes and makes you wonder indolently what the inside of the valley is like. And somehow these almost unvisited cauldrons are not made less mysterious, but rather more so, by your seeing how wholly they must lie under the observation of watchers so supremely unrevealing as the great iced peaks which overlook them. (p. 62)
This lengthy description of the complicated topography basically means that from the city, there is very little idea of what lies in the territory which fills the space between the city and the extreme north. One reason for this ignorance is that the capital city is the capital of a rail network; its cosmopolitan knowledge of its own territories, and those of its enemy in war, is drawn solely from news and goods delivered by train. In fact, most of the citizens are entirely mistaken about the location of the war itself: ‘But as to military movements, all that most Rians knew was that for seven days past the railway running from the City, straight up the Big Slope, had been thronged, day and night, with troop trains bound for the little terminus outside the entrance to Scout Valley. So the common man, to whom secrets of State were not told, looked solely towards Scout Valley, felt that great things were doing up there.’ (p. 63) The common citizen therefore entirely misses the fact that at the same time, a small force of handpicked men were heading north via a small road or ‘drainage spout’, five miles short of the terminus under the mouth of Scout Valley (p. 73).
The partial blindness of railway oriented maps is a constant theme in the novel, where the military planning all takes place in the capital city according to stabilised ground plans, and therefore takes no account of the various disused roads, tiny tracks and goat paths which the troop come across and spontaneously use on their mission. As the editor of the city paper, The Voice, warns in the first chapter, ‘“You see, a mere line drawn like that is no use. To make it any good you must ride every yard, with a map in your hand, and see how all the little streams go, and tiny ridges, and mark it by them” (Cyril p. 25). The landscape of the route the troop discover, on the other hand, is unfamiliar, manipulable, and disorderly, and seems to be entirely lacking in discernible landmarks. It is described as ‘the wilderness’ (p. 80) and as producing all sorts of visual mirages: ‘The next rise in the road … was some four miles away, but it looked scarcely two in the morbid clearness of the air’ (p. 103), and ‘So far it had looked as if the valley might have an end somewhere. But next day … it looked endless … Wherever they were, all that day, the view ahead was the same.’ (p. 82)
It is on their journey to the ‘frozen wilds’ which lay ahead of them (p. 86) that the men of the troop avoid the main battle, in which the rest of the army is decimated, and escape instead into the Lost Valley, to discover a rural society of Lancashire emigrants who are barely touched by news of the country’s bad fortunes in war, for ‘That was how Ria’s Lost Valley had come by the name. No maker of maps had ever been in it, and very few other people except the members of the village commune who possessed it.’ (p. 136). The Lost Tribe are rural characters writ large, with thick accents (“A head man is ut?” the tribesman replied in the speech of Kildare, which Merrick had loved in early days at the Curragh … “There’s wan man does wan thing, and wan does another, but divil a foreman is there in ut at all.” (p. 138)), entirely removed from the city by dint of the distance of their valley from any rail terminus. It is therefore a tranquil, bucolic scene:
They must have been even more at a loss when they looked up from the morning’s business of threshing oats and attending to cows … It was strange enough that a seemingly endless runlet of men should be trickling into Lost Valley at all; stranger that they should come by a way never used by anyone. (p. 137)
By taking this route, the troop of men become radical agents or renegades in the landscape, momentarily free from the constraints of the map. As Willan declares, there is
“All the world before us, Lovel. We’re a lost legion, my boy.”
“We’ve done the impossible, Lovel,” said Merrick. “With some slight assistance from Nature, we’re clean off the Intelligence map. We’re an unmarked force; we’re x, the unknown quantity; we don’t exist, till we see fit to cut in.” (p. 132)
Yet it is this movement outside the established map which also means that Willan and his troop are entirely cut off from their native city. As the enemy successfully captures the city of Ria, Willan waits to plan a surprise rescue attack – but they cannot get word through to their compatriots at home, for
They had no wireless, no means of using the air; they were almost as utterly cast away and cut off as a legion severed from a Roman army in an Alpine battle. (p. 171)
The captured city simply cannot imagine where they have gone to, and not knowing of the bypasses the troop found in the mountain, of which they created a new route North, the city’s officials put the lost soldiers on the lists of those Missing Presumed Dead. Finally, the hopeless city waves a white flag and surrenders to the enemy, little suspecting that the last rebellious and mobile element of the Rian forces could be waiting in the wings in a valley accessible only by road and therefore not included in the stabilised military view of the landscape. The lost soldiers are thus the only element in the landscape still resisting the peace, and as such occupy the ’savage’ geography in the margins of the novel.
While C. E. Montague is not writing explicitly about the driving experience, his adoption of the newness of the Great North Road is shown in the struggle in the novel between the interchangeable military knowledge, urban knowledge and railway knowledge (all to do with pre-plotting), against the new form of rebellious mobility, which allowed a different kind of adaptability and manipulation of route during movement in the terrain itself. That terrain is a brand new hinterland full of darkness, difficulty, war, mist, and fog, and described as ‘fifty miles of white mist and black landscape’ ‘brimming with a kind of enigmatic solemnity’ (p. 75 and 76).
The strange temporal and visual effects of this road means that once Willan has decided to return to the city on a rescue operation, his troop is there almost instantly, within the space of one chapter dealing with city affairs and with no mention of the troop’s journey from A to B.
However, the speed and convenience of this relocation, or disappearance and reappearance, is eventually in vain. The moment at which, armed to the teeth and with new boots, the hopeful saviours approach the city walls again, is shown symbolically by a scene in which the enemy military captain, who has captured the city, places a compass decisively on a map at the very same time that the forgotten troop make their way back south over the horizon (or back within the compass of the map). The Rian rebels are no longer lost in some strange land right off the map, but found. Unfortunately however, found by the enemy – so their return to familiar geography leads in the end, anticlimactically, to recapture, defeat and death. This is not a redemptive narrative, but rather, concerns a transitory space (see Nicholas Parker’s paper on C. E. Montague and patriotic evasion, in the same conference). The rogue troop here find a temporary and irregular feature in the geography, which seems to provide an escape from war – as if there could be a space prior to or free from politics. Yet this space abruptly disappears on the rebels’ return to civilization.
‘Earth had slipped from their wheels’: To the North
At the end of Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North (1932), Emmeline and Markie are driving down a road which has become ‘the icy rim to the known world’[3], into a landscape indicated only by abstract signposts (first ‘he saw ‘The North’ written low, like a first whisper, on a yellow A. A. plate with an arrow pointing’[4], and then ‘like a loud chord struck on the dark, she saw: ‘TO THE NORTH’ written black on white, with a long black immovably flying arrow’[5]). Their destination has taken on the same abstract qualities, as ‘from beyond, the North – ice and unbreathed air, lights whose reflections since childhood had brightened and chilled her sky … – reclaimed her for its clear solitude’[6]. Both a place and a direction, the north is morphed with the foreign, purer North of ‘unbreathed air’ beyond England, in the internalisation of vocabulary such as ‘icy’ (‘leaving him icy with apprehension’), ‘frozen’, ‘dazzled’, ‘blind’, ‘dark’, and, most specifically, ‘aurora’: ‘He watched the next lights dawn like doom, make a harsh aurora, bite into the road’s hard horizon and, widening, flood the Great North Road from bank to bank’[7] (The internalisation of Arctic vocabulary to describe the British landscape can be followed up, incidentally, in Peter Davidson’s The Idea of North.)
The Great North Road here seems to lead into another country entirely, just as the Great West Road will appear to do to another passenger, two years later:
After the familiar muddle of West London, the Great West Road looked very odd. Being new, it did not look English. We might have suddenly rolled into California. (J. B. Priestley, English Journey, 1934)
As Emmeline drives on, the local specificities of the landscape around the couple are drowned out in what Thomas Hardy has called ‘an amplitude of Northern knowledge’ (from The Return of the Native). The landscape outside of the car is not unlike that in Evelyn Waugh’s famous automobile novel Vile Bodies, written two years earlier, in which ‘there was rarely more than a quarter of a mile of the black road to be seen at one time. It unrolled like a length of cinema film. At the edges was confusion; a fog spinning past’ (p. 168). In To the North, too, the road’s environment exhibits none of the distinguishing features which led Lionel Cuffe, a few months later in 1932, to claim that a person taken blindfolded in a train or car and dumped down in any part of England ‘could tell almost at once what county he was in by the landscape’, particularly in the North, which is constituted according to him by even more distinct small regions than the South, it being ‘less than ten miles between the mist-laden, mud-soaked, pink-encumbered plains of Cheshire and the grey, almost Cotswold-like peaks of Derbyshire’.[9] In Bowen, however, in contrast, ‘the North’ extends its abstract, homogenising influence over every mile of the Great North Road, even from its start in the city (where ‘the cold pole’s first magnetism began to tighten upon them as street by street the heat and exasperation of London kept flaking away’[10]); this surreal proximity a clear take on the collapse of exotic distances in the new technologised landscape[11]. (See image at top: though created many years later and incorporating the M1, it shows a similar collapse of exotic distances into the mental map of the route North.)
The Great North Road was anomalous because it was only in the fifties that the roads programme was consolidated into the construction of well-planned new systems ‘intended to bind together the city, countryside, regions and nation, providing order in the landscape and enabling the orderly movement of motorized citizens and goods to their destinations’[12]. The new advisory motoring supplements, the new Motorway Code, and the Landscape Advisory Committee’s motorway rules were only some of the flush of regulations released after this novel and before the opening of the M1 in 1959. At the time of Bowen’s writing, the Great North Road was not associated with this regimentation and orderliness, and the modernity of the driving experience thus leads to the road, which was of a new, simple and functional design and modernist aesthetics, being seen as a strange hinterland where ‘fields and woods vanished unknown beyond the headlights’[13] and ‘miles mounted by tens: she felt nothing’[14].
The critic Peter Merriman has surveyed the contentions surrounding the aesthetics of major roads, where certain shrubs and flowers were rejected, for instance, if they were deemed too ornamental or distracting for a driver who at the new speeds must keep his eyes firmly on the road; one objection, for instance, was to plants whose colours might clash with that of the petrol pumps.[15] In contrast, a train traveller in Right Off the Map is described looking ‘from window to window in quick succession, lest he should miss any of the delights that were half-visible on both sides of the railway … on each side a low bank of earth sloped up from the line, and these banks were a market-garden crowded with all kinds and tints of roses. Among them the strong lights of the train struck lively and fugitive notes of white, crimson, scarlet and pink … in a gay melody of colour.’ (p. 34)
Hence, to drive up such a road, where the flowers are coloured to the petrol pumps, is to feel as if one has been entirely divorced from the landscape[16], and to experience a simultaneous motionlessness and speed. This is the ‘trancelike … sense of standstill’ which Emmeline and Markie experience, a ‘not-quite oblivion’ in which ‘their headlights sent unmoving arrows that died ahead’[17]. Like the ‘unmoving arrows’ of the headlights and the ‘immovable arrow’ of the road sign, they have become locked in frozen speed, in a morphing of ‘North’ as destination and direction, the only sign of their movement through space being Markie’s frequent glances at the dials of the clock and the speedometer.
Throughout To the North the reader is reminded of the conflict between regimented concepts of time and space (for example, Emmeline ‘adored fact – the exact departure of trains’, and ‘the map of Europe was never far from her mind’[18]) and those more subjective experiences of time and space, as in the surreal global proportions of the car ride along ‘the icy rim to the known world’. Elsewhere, Emmeline’s experience of personal geographical space, in her sensation of transcendental love, is compared to stolidly orthodox geographical measurements:
She was in love, and hung between earth and heaven: meanwhile the typed correspondence … mounted up on her desk. Maps were maps, the world shrank in its net of red routes, of rails and airways: this was a small office regarding a courtyard, where Tripp bumped her elbow and Peter crackled his finger joints.[19]
As a shipping agent, Emmeline is constantly struggling with the maps on her desk, planning her clients’ experiences abroad, and attempting to control the chaos that must accompany placing oneself outside of the known. The increasing normalisation and institutionalisation of holidaymaking, meanwhile, is indicated in the changes in Emmeline’s offices, as the old secretary is replaced with the cold, efficient Tripp, and as ‘the graphs curled down from the walls and they pinned up time-tables’[20]. The romantic, surreal connotations of travel – the sense Emmeline’s clients get of ‘the whole world offered them smiling’ through the ‘archway’ of her office[21] – fades with the novelty, as holidays become absorbed in the general movements of thirties life as ‘just one thing more to be undertaken’[22].
One of Markie’s final sentiments about being perpetually ‘no more than delayed on a journey elsewhere’[23] is as applicable inside the country as outside, shown by Julian’s sister who ‘return(ing) from abroad … had three days in London on her way through to Shropshire’[24], and in the fact that Woburn Place is ‘full of people from Wales and the North, so intoxicated at having left home at all that they are ready to go on anywhere’[25]. The internalisation of touristic thought is particularly demonstrated by Emmeline’s trip to Paris, when ‘Emmeline, looking across the Channel, suddenly felt a stranger in her own home, a home she had perhaps never fully inhabited’[26].
The most radical effect on Emmeline’s understanding of England, however, comes when she is looking down in a ‘cold new reality of the cloudscape’ from a plane which passes to the coast, ‘Kent drawn liquidly under it like a river’ as ‘the serrated gold coast-line and creeping line of the sea were verifying the atlas’[27]. Published only a year after Antoine de Saint-Exupiere’s Night Flight (1931), the chapter ‘In the Air’ has a significant metaphorical effect on the later chapters in the novel, in which Emmeline frequently slips into the same aerial perspective, imagining ‘slopes rushing with cars’ outside London and chimneys that from the air ‘reeled as you flew … Emmeline asked herself if this distended present, this oppressive contraction of space, would be properties of airmindedness’[28]. Having returned to the ground, she cannot regain her former status as groundminded, remembering clearly her sense of oppression on ‘plunging once more in this shadowy network when she had been lately seeing so clear a plan’[29]. The home territory is challenged by the form of movement that has been taken across it, and seems much more unsteady; the buildings seem ‘frail as plaster’[30] while later her sense of home is also shown to be unsteady, as her neighbourhood in St. John’s Wood ‘appeared strange to her’[31] and she experiences ‘a sense of being swept strongly apart on a current from all she had held to’[32].
In the final drive, as Emmeline and Markie reach terminal velocity, she feels herself lifting off from the earth once more, as ‘like earth shrinking and sinking, irrelevant, under the rising wings of a plane, love with its unseen plan, its constrictions and urgencies, dropped to a depth below Emmeline, who now looked down unmoved at the shadowy map of her pain’[33]. The variety in modes of travel, which have afforded new ways of looking at the landscape (particularly symbolic is Emmeline’s view of the empty railways spread across England below her in the plane, this novel coming five years after the start of the railway’s decline in 1927), end up having a collective impact. This is a book that was begun on a train, embarked on an aeroplane flight half way through, and is punctuated by restless drives with anti-climactic ends: ‘Having motored twenty-five miles they sat on the stump of a Roman villa … the chauffeur paced gloomily round it’[34]. In the final chapter, all of the threats speed had been linked with since the turn of the century, in Beard’s diagnosis of ‘neurasthenia’ as a symptom of modern shock at the onset of new speeds and forms of travel, enact themselves with a vengeance on the car passengers. Emmeline and Markie feel the disorienting effects of every advancement in mobile technology take their toll on them all at once, until finally their relationship with the earth is entirely broken:
An immense idea of departure – expresses getting steam up and crashing from termini, liners clearing the docks, the shadows of planes rising, caravans winding out into the first dip of the desert – possessed her spirit, now launched like the long arrow … (like) the traveller solitary with his uncertainties, with apprehensions he cannot communicate, seeing the strands of the known snap like paper ribbons.[35]
Ignoring the sexual elements of the plot here, we see Emmeline and Markie, having reached terminal velocity (literally), disappear from the novel in a car-crash which morphs into it hints of rail and plane travel, as if they are in fact driving off into an abstract sense of eternal transit.
The final word of the novel, ‘home’ (where Emmeline and Markie are anxiously awaited), has appeared in problematic contexts throughout. With hindsight, even the first two lines of the novel anticipate what is in store and suggests the way the new mobility of the Great North Road may unseat the concept of Britain as a familiar territory, as here ‘a breath from the north’ leads on to ‘uncertain thoughts of home’:
Towards the end of April a breath from the north blew cold down Milan platforms to meet the returning traveller. Uncertain thoughts of home filled the station restaurant where the English sat lunching uneasily, facing the clock.[36]
Both of these texts show how the GNR’s new form in 1927 prompted explorations of what it means to be off or on the map, and to belong or not belong to one’s home territory; the new mobility, new appearance, new speed and new route of the Great North Road led to its literary use in both cases not as a British location, but as a suitable symbol, during this very short period of a few years when it was still an alien phenomenon, for the British experience of dislocation.
Original conference programme available here: http://www.utopianspaces.org/
For further reading, see (particularly) Frank Morley’s The Great North Road (1961). The following are also useful:
Banham, R., ‘New Way North’, New Society 20, May 4 (1972)
Crowe, S., The Landscape of Roads (1960)
Davidson, P., The Idea of North (2005)
Fussell, P., Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1982)
Matless, D., ed., Geographies of British Modernity (2003)
Merriman, P., Driving spaces: a cultural-historical geography (2007)
[1] E. V. Lucas, Highways & Byways in Sussex, ix
[2] Montague, Right Off the Map, p. 133-6
[3] Bowen, To the North, p. 318
[4] Ibid., p. 319
[5] Ibid., p. 325
[6] Ibid., p. 323
[7] Ibid., p. 327
[8] J. B. Priestley, English Journey, p. 9
[9] Cuffe, ‘Twenty Countries in a Single Island’, a review of Batsford’s publication of The Landscape of England. The Architectural Review, Sept 1933, 102-3
[10] To the North, p. 317.
[11] See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, p. 211-40
[12] Merriman, Peter, ‘‘A Power for Good or Evil’: Geographies of the M1 in Late Fifties Britain’, Geographies of British Modernity, p. 127; see also Banham, R., ‘New Way North’, New Society 20, May 4
[13] To the North, p. 323
[14] Ibid, p. 325
[15] Geographies of British Modernity, p. 119.
[16] As Tony Brooks later remarked of the M1, ‘To drive up (it) is to feel as if the England of one’s childhood … is no more. This broad six-lane through-way, divorced from the countryside, divorced from towns and villages, kills the image of a tight little island full of hamlets and lanes and pubs.’ Cited in Matless, p. 126
[17] To the North, p. 323
[18] Ibid, p. 32-3
[19] Ibid., p. 170
[20] Ibid., p. 300
[21] Ibid., p. 299
[22] Ibid., p. 300
[23] Ibid., p. 324
[24] Ibid., p. 149
[25] Ibid., p. 38
[26] Ibid., p. 200
[27] Ibid., p. 186
[28] Ibid., p. 194
[29] Ibid., p. 190
[30] Ibid., p. 190
[31] Ibid., p. 298
[32] Ibid., p. 279
[33] To the North, p. 326
[34] Ibid., p. 83
[35] Ibid., p. 325-6
[36] Ibid., p. 13

I heard and enjoyed this paper at the Utopian Spaces conference, and it inspired me to read ‘Right off the Map’, which I heartily recommend to anyone else.
You treat it as a book of the twenties, but did you know that according to Oliver Elton’s ‘C.E.Montague: A Memoir’ it began life as a play, written in 1902 and never performed? The play’s manuscript is lost, according to Elton, writing in 1929, just after Montague’s death.
One can see the theatrical origins in the early scenes in Ria (lots of characters making entries and exits in one location);. But then the action widens out, and the geographical bits that you are most interested in were pretty certainly additions of the twenties, as are the satirical passages about war propaganda and suchlike – so your interpretation of it as a twenties work is valid.
Thanks for pointing me in the book’s direction.
Hi George, thanks so much for your response. I’ll definitely take a look at the memoir: I know very little about C. E. Montague as it’s not precisely my period. Nicholas Parker, who was presenting in your panel in the morning, also suggested I take a look at Montague’s travel writing collected in ‘The Right Place’ (1924), apparently including one suggestive essay on British landscape. The two of you are the only people I’ve met (aside from me) who’ve talked about C. E. Montague, so I feel pretty lucky to have run into you!
[...] C.E.Montague. In particular, there was a paper on Montague’s 1927 novel, Right Off the Map, by Amy Cutler, who has posted it in full on her very promising new blog. This sparked my interest greatly, so I’ve been reading the book. I’d heard of Right Off the [...]
Montague’s ‘Right Off the Map’ « Great War Fiction said this on October 24, 2009 at 5:03 pm |