On International Appeal

I’m Australian, and – quite obviously, since it’s set on and around the Sydney Harbour Bridge – Falling is set in Australia. The characters work and go about their business in real places which are very identifiable in our world, from the Royal North Shore Hospital to the block of flats on the corner of Chuter Ave and Ramsgate Road where Dale lives and which I’ve written about before.

Many of the other novels I’ve written have been written about and set in or around Australia too – not out of patriotism, simply by virtue of the each book’s premise. A courtroom drama deals with protagonists from Australia and the UK. A military/action thrillr takes place in the Arafura sea.

There’s one book – a drama about a teenage boy and his path to becoming an activist – where I invented place names simply because the locations in the story (other than schools, hockey fields, suburban homes, etc) don’t matter to the plot or the characters’ journeys.

All of which begs the question; in a world where so much of the culture we get from mass entertainment is centred in the US, does writing about your part of the world potentially limit your readership?

It’s certainly getting better, with companies like Netflix making a big splash with various international production hubs and mandates to bring local stories from their homes countries to a global audience. But there’s still somewhat of a whiff in Hollywood (movies and TV) and New York (books) of the old days where your story had to be set in America – or contain distinguishable American values and outlooks – to play to a global audience.

If that’s the case and Falling would have a potentially wider international appeal if it wasn’t so firmly anchored to a particular region and city, what would the fix be? Set it nowhere, a made up place with everything from suburbs to streets given invented names, even the familiar shape of the Sydney Harbour Bridge called something else?

Mechanically it wouldn’t be too overwhelming a job; I’d just have to search for every proper noun and – where they refer to Birchgrove (Tim’s office), Bondi Junction (Vicki’s practice), Miranda (Barry’s practice) or the Sydney Town Hall offices (where the official response to the crisis formulates) – call them ‘Birchdale’, ‘Brigand’s Junction’, ‘Ramada’ the ‘Surfield Town Hall’, etc.

But as you can imagine, that’d come across as ridiculous. I might as well write a foreword saying; ‘this is obviously about Sydney but I’m afraid of getting sued or something’.

Option B would be to go full The Vanishing or Oldboy, lifting the entire story wholesale and situatiing it in an American locale. Is it possible? It’s not impossible, but it’d be a far bigger task than that I’ve described above. I’d have to not just find place and street names, I’d have to watch for every instance where I’m describing the local geopgraphy, cultural customs and idioms and more.

Take the early sequence where Dale is crossing the Harbour Bridge on the train and starts to see things that freak him out. The poor woman next to him, reading a magazine, only wants to get away from this weirdo out of embarrassment. The only other country where it would work – where people are so fiercely keeping their own counsel rather than talk to strangers, almost apologetic abotu their very presence in the world – would be the UK. If Falling was set in America someone would pull out a Glock.

I’m kidding, but more importantly than whether it’s possible to do in a mechanical sense, would doing so work?

Not even a little bit. I don’t claim to have the last word on describing Sydney and its inhabitants, but I feel I absolutely know how the spirit of Sydney and its people would behave according to my emotional connection to it. Those behaviours and movements are inexorably connected to the places (shops, offices, houses, etc) where they happen – no different than the spiritual bond First Nations people tell us they have with their lands.

To take all that away and try to clumsily plonk it down on Chicago, Birmingham or Mumbai would suck all the spiritual energy out of that connection. Not only because you’d be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole (no two cities are alike) but because I’d have to go and live in Chicago or Birmingham or Mumbai for 25 years to get the full measure of them. Cities, like many locations in ficiton, are characters, and I can write with some authority not just about the geography of Sydney but its character because I’m from there.

All of which obliquely answers the question I started with; does having a novel set so identifiably in Sydney potentially limit its potential? I might never know, but it’s a moot point. To try and change it would be harder than shifting genres entirely and making it a slapstick comedy musical.

Although now I think of it, I wonder if Alan Menken is available to pen the words to Oh the Bridge Came Crashing Down?