The Canary Islands and Me: The Origins of Sense of Place in Fiction

13th March 2022

The Canary Islands and Me: the Origins of Sense of Place in Fiction.

TalkingLocationWith … author Isobel Blackthorn.

For authors, cultivating a sense of place in fiction is rarely a process of sticking a pin in a map and building a narrative around that location. Although I did do that once, more or less, for a short story, and the result was serendipitous. If it hadn’t been, I would have upped sticks for a better location.

Fuerteventura

More likely the author has an affinity for a particular location, has holidayed or lived there, and feels inspired by the setting just as Lawrence Durrell was inspired to write The Alexandria Quartet, and Alexander McCall Smith was inspired by his former home of Botswana, resulting in The Number One Ladies Detective Agency.

Even though I’m a Brit living in Australia, I’ve written six novels set in the Canary Islands, three each in Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. It’s become something of an intermittent obsession. My association with these islands is about as far as you can get from sticking a pin in a map.

Ruins Fuerteventura

I first heard of Lanzarote in 1987 when friends invited my then partner and myself to visit. They’d only just arrived on the island themselves and were thinking we would love the place. I recall arriving at the tiny airport situated on a dusty, rocky plain in the warm sunshine and greeting these new friends. I felt like a character in a Graham Greene novel.

January, and it was a relief to escape the London winter for a few weeks. I loved the rustic vibe, the emptiness, the stark and strange landscape and especially the volcanoes. And when, on a second visit, our friends took us up into an elevated valley strewn with palm trees and cradled by mountains, to a village of whitewashed cuboid buildings hugging narrow streets, I fell in love. More than that. I wanted the earth to grab hold of me and never let go. My passion for the village of Haría defined the events that followed and six months later we were living in Lanzarote, restoring an ancient farmhouse and working as teachers to make a crust.

Timanfaya

Fast forward to 2013 and the beginnings of my literary journey. Lanzarote was already on my creative map, having come crashing back into my awareness the moment I decided I wanted to become a creative writer a few years before, at last following a passion I had supressed since a child. I spent the whole of 2013 immersed in all things Lanzarote. I used Google Maps so much, I called the little street view man my new boyfriend. I trawled through countless photos and YouTube videos and, as I explored, I yearned to return to an island I hadn’t visited since I left abruptly in 1990. The result was The Drago Tree, a love story brimming with that same passion.

The Drago Tree was published two years later, and my publisher found the novel so inspiring she offered to travel with me to Lanzarote to check the place out for herself. That trip precipitated another novel, a mystery this time, and, as it turned out, the first of five.

I could have had no idea how my connection to Lanzarote would evolve through the contacts and friendships I made there. Those friendships took me to Fuerteventura, an island I had visited many times in the late 1980s. I was inspired by one theme after another – a campaign to stop ancient buildings falling into ruin, the discovery of a prison camp used to incarcerate gay men – ­to keep writing, as though I would eventually write myself back into the landscape.

Maguez

So far, that hasn’t happened. In February 2020 I was poised to make the move from Australia when Covid 19 struck. But as one Australian friend pointed out to me, the passion I have for the islands is based on yearning, and if I lived there, that yearning would vanish. It was the missing that created the inspiration. He might be right, but I haven’t tested his theory. I have no idea if I ever will. I do know whenever we as readers find in a novel a powerful sense of place, it’s because the author has a grand passion for that location and, quite possibly, is tormented by memories, nostalgia and longing.

(Photos by Majorero photographer and artist JF Olivares)

Isobel Blackthorn

Isobel is a prolific Australian novelist. She writes both contemporary/literary, thrillers and dark fiction. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and via her website. 

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