Footsteps

Every now and then a reader writes to tell me that they’ve gone on vacation to one of the settings I’ve used in my books, and have sat where my characters sat or have walked on the same path, and I’m always amazed and incredibly flattered that someone would go to the trouble of doing that.

Not that I don’t understand.

In the spring of 2007, I took a research trip to Greece, for the half-finished sequel to Every Secret Thing (which was coming along fine until the idea for The Winter Sea took over, and since then it’s been puddling along in fits and starts between the other novels…)

My mother came with me, because Greece was somewhere she’d wanted to go nearly all her life, and since we share a love of Mary Stewart's novels—some of the best of which are set in Greece—the trip, for us both, had the air of a pilgrimage.

So on our way from Athens to the island where my story would be set, we detoured north and went to Delphi.

As our bus squeezed through Arachova we looked for—and felt sure we’d spotted—the steps Simon came down in My Brother Michael when he first arrived to help Camilla with the car. We reached the ruins of Apollo’s temple in late afternoon, just as the other tourists all seemed to be leaving, and we had it almost to ourselves.

I stood dead centre on the ancient theatre’s stage so we could try the voice-trick thing (it does work, by the way, and it was every bit as magical as I had hoped it would be).

We stayed the night in town, spent the next morning tracking down the location of the old Apollon Hotel—where Mary Stewart’s heroine Camilla stays when she arrives in Delphi—and having found it we decided, naturally, we ought to have lunch in the same place where Camilla sat with Simon.

And while I sat imagining the characters around me, seeing Simon and Camilla having dinner while the painter with his donkey trundled past, it suddenly occurred to me that I was sitting, not just where the characters had sat, but where Mary Stewart herself must have sat, “facing over the valley towards the distant gleam of the Corinthian gulf” beneath the “two big plane trees” that “made a deep island of shade for some wooden tables and chairs”.

The view and the plane trees and tables and chairs were still there, the way they’re described in the book, as were the lights hanging high in the boughs of the trees.

While I doubt that my chair was the same one she sat in, I felt a new sense of connection to my favourite author, and I couldn’t help wondering how she'd have felt, knowing two of her readers had come all that way just to walk the same path as her characters.

What about you? Are there fictional footsteps that you’d like to walk in? Have you ever taken a holiday somewhere because of a book?