Imaginary and dreamlike ... cities tend to do what novelists want them to do. Photograph:M C Escher/Don McPhee
When it comes to geographical settings for novels, it's sometimes hard to know the difference between fictional cities and real ones. New Yorker Sarah Weinman recently bristled at finding her neck of the woods fictionalised in a new novel. Why did it rub her up the wrong way? Presumably because no two people's New Yorks are the same.
The New York of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy feels as imaginary and dreamlike as the strange anonymous setting of his futuristic novel In The Country of Last Things. Whereas the New York of his wife Siri Hustvedt's gripping novel What I Loved could be nowhere other than Manhattan. So, even sleeping in the same bed as someone doesn't mean you're necessarily living in the same city as them. Place is a matter of perspective.
Maybe that's why I'd always thought that Oran, the claustrophobic, mountain-backed, North African setting of Camus' The Plague, was a fictional city - though that's clearly down to my poor Algerian geography, too. The epic, allegorical atmosphere of The Plague makes it feel as though the novel's port city could only have been a product of Camus' imagination, which, of course, it also is. Real or not, cities tend to do what novelists want them to do.
Does the London of Martin Amis' London Fields really bear any resemblance to the city of his title? His London is a deliberately poetic, hyper-real creation. Whereas the city in Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's Dirty Havana Trilogy is quintessentially Havana. Gutiérrez isn't after postmodern satire - his book wants to sledgehammer you with everyday existence in Castro's capital. And then there are novels where the setting is so psychologically charged it'd be virtually pointless giving the location a name. Imagine Kafka's The Trial pinning itself down hard and fast in Prague. Except that at the same time, where else could it be but Prague? That's one of Kafka's strongest suits, though. Never really knowing where you are.
The same goes in spades for Ferenc Karinthy's classic Hungarian novel Metropole, now translated into English for the first time. Almost of necessity, it's set in a city with no name. Budai, the novel's protagonist, takes a wrong plane on his way to a conference in Helsinki and ends up in a nightmarish capital where the inhabitants speak an unrecognisable language. His journey, of course, is into a dream world. His city is a troubled psychic state, embodied by a teeming metropolis.
What I've always found peculiar (and enthralling, in equal measure) is that quaint convention of the realist novel, where authors go epically out of their way to give fictional names to clearly real places. Why does Eliot turn Coventry into Middlemarch? Why does Hardy present Dorchester as Casterbridge? Perhaps they're just stamping these places with their personal seal of fictionalisation - showing that their powers of realism are so mighty they can reinvent real places.
Ok, now it's your turn to unpick the imaginary from the realistic. Which novels take place in these fictional settings:
1. West Egg 2. Maycomb 3. Bouville 4. Lantern Yard 5. Interzone 6. Rummidge 7. Phraxos 8. Montsou 9. Svanï City 10. Eastwick
