A long way from page to plage ... Highway One as was. Photograph: Joseph Sohm/Corbis
I don't want to make you jealous, but I'm writing this on a bench near Big Sur on the California coast. (Actually, if I'm honest, there's probably a part of me, like there is in most travellers, that does want to make you jealous - but that's beside the point. It seems churlish to complain when I'm in such a wonderful place, looking out on such beautiful cliffs, listening to the hummingbirds whirring behind my head and the throb of the Pacific Ocean below. All the same, two books I've been reading have dampened the glow a little, rather like the sea fog that's right now making me wonder if it isn't time to retreat back into my cabin.
Magnificent as it is, the wilderness around the famous Highway One doesn't quite live up to its portrayal in Jack Kerouac's Big Sur or Henry Miller's Devil In Paradise. Kerouac describes a lonely, haunting place, but now his few bohemians on the beaches have been replaced by tourists. Certainly these sun-kissed Californians are less troubled than the poor unwilling Father of the Beats was in the alcoholic declining years that he describes so vividly in the book.
However, what I witnessed of brightly coloured tents and stereos blasting middle-of-the-road rock'n'roll (at a very un-rock'n'roll eight o'clock in the morning), held little of his strange magic either. Meanwhile, I shudder to think how Miller would react to the angry trails of SUVs dirtying the air around his isolated retreat - or indeed how bemused he'd be to discover over-curious English saps like me pottering around his premises.
When you're looking for the perfect match between literature and location, satisfaction is not always guaranteed. Places change after writers describe them, often for the worse, sometimes for the better (I'm going to Cannery Row next week and expect that things are going to be much more cheerful there than in Steinbeck's day). And it's part of the job for writers to use considerable poetic license when describing location. It's foolish and naive to expect places to be exactly as they are in the books we love.
But somehow it's still disappointing when they're different - and you can end up like me here, feeling you've got to a place 50 years too late. So as the holiday season approaches, I'll be delighted to hear some recommendations for where the chemistry does work. What locations are brought to life by books about them and which places enrich the reading experience?
