Talking Location With author Thomas Hocknell – Arkansas and Sussex

25th September 2019

#TalkingLocationWith… Thomas Hocknell, author of Unfinished Business, set in Arkansas and Sussex.

Following the recent publication of Unfinished Business, the second Life Assistance Agency novel, I’ve been kindly asked to do a blogpost on the importance of location in fictional writing. I’m actually furious that I hadn’t already blogged about this, as so many novels perfectly encapsulate place, sometimes even better than the location itself. The Prague of Milan Kundera, or the London of Patrick Hamilton are each somehow more real than the actual cities themselves. To read a novel can result in visiting the place it is set and be disappointed. I imagine this is particularly pronounced for Game of Thrones fans visiting Winterfell at Castle Ward in Northern Ireland only to discover it was a composite, with the other half being Down Castle in Scotland.

To be honest I do question whether some writers have actually visited the places they set their novels, and I don’t just mean Arthur C Clarke not having been to Thalassa. There are novels such as both Lawrence Osborne’s Beautiful Animals and John Fowles’ The Magus that are as inseparable from the Greek islands as L.A. is to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

My favourite moment as a published writer was when someone (I like to recall her as a fan) approached me at literary festival to ask about locations in The Life Assistance Agency. She specifically asked if there was indeed an abandoned police station in London’s Marble Arch. Yes I replied, somewhat dumbstruck at such clear evidence that she had read my novel. She hadn’t just claimed to have read it, but was asking about specific details; even my Mum hadn’t done that. I was delighted. She was also nervous, which endeared her even further to me.  I overcame my own nerves and confirmed that it was indeed in existence, and that discovering it had given me the sort of rush familiar to punters waving winning stubs at horserace finishing lines. It was the sort of location you couldn’t make up.

I love to find interesting places and then think of some way to shoehorn them into a novel. It is always place first. I did this with Unfinished Business. I was reading about deserted theme parks as you do, and realised I needed one in my novel. When I say need, it was more of a gratuitous desire than need, but what’s the difference?

The Internet took minutes to discover the Dogpatch rustic theme park in Arkansas that fell to its financial knees in the 80s and crawled onwards before finally surrendering to debtors in 1993. It was based on Al Capp’s hillbilly-themed Li’l Abner comic strip (nope, me neither), and tapped into an appetite for American hillbillies and trout fishing that didn’t exist outside the owners’ business model. To think folk were paying to walk through fake dilapidated buildings in the US while UK teenagers were loitering around mobile phones in motorway service station car parks to confirm the location of a rave is staggering.

Anyway, there was Barney Barnsmell’s Skunk-Works, Rotten Raplhie’s Rick-O-Shay Riffle Range, a rollercoaster called Earthquake McGoon’s Brain Rattler and you could feed mechanical pigs rubbish. I mean what’s not to like, although I’m guessing this gave Trip Advisor reviews at the time an open goal. But as a setting it was perfect, everyone likes spooky theme parks, apart from Scooby Doo and it plays a crucial role in the new novel. I endeavour to visit the places I set my writing, but in this case it was hard to justify travelling 4, 500 miles to see smell rusting remains of mechanical skunks.

Unfinished Business is not set solely in the US, which in light of me not having visited is for the best. Leafy Sussex and the chalky edge of England were far easier to investigate. I was however a little alarmed that the drive to Beachy Head was longer than expected, as it appeared to have moved to the far side of Eastbourne from where I expected.

I’d like Unfinished Business to be synonymous with the landscape of Sussex in the same way that Newfoundland in Annie Proulx’s Shipping News, but if it simply provokes a reader to ask if the deserted theme park in Arkansas is real then I’ll be happy enough. One day I’ll visit and see if the locations of pivotal events in the novel match up to how I described them (although I’m very happy for feedback so long as it’s not too cutting on Amazon reviews). But above all, there’s a part of me that believes all the events happened in a fictional place that almost exists.

Thank you so much to Tom for this entertaining piece. And you can buy both his books through the TripFiction database

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