I'm beginning to notice how many books, particularly first published books, that are set over one hot summer. There are a couple on here, mine is, and there have been numerous ones in the past: A Month In The Country, for starters.

So what is it about a single summer that inspires writers?

I reckon part of it is the neat time frame a summer can encapsulate - not too short, not too long. There's the in-built drama of all that hot weather, the sweaty sweltering stuff.

I guess there are practicalities too - characters can spend time out of doors and be doing things not possible in the winter. A few of my scenes are at a bend in a river where kids from the village gather to swim.

I think there's also a nostalgia/biographical element. When we raid our memories for material the summer time is probably when we were all out doing things.

Conversely a lot of books are set in winter, but I wonder if as many use the whole season as a time frame. I suspect not.

My instinct says you're right, though Helen Dunmore's The Siege is very, very wintry (wintery?), and a brilliant book.

I think the heat has something to do with it - you're very aware of yourself physically when you're hot so much of the time. And with schools on holiday (all those coming-of-age stories) and people away and so on there's a sense of time being on hold, and, conversely, the knowledge that it won't always be like this. Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day, set in WW2, captures it in the most extraordinary, almost hallucinogenic way.

Half of TMoL is set in ten days in the summer (the other half covers just over a year, and the cycle of the seasons is very important in that strand too). I planned it purely so I didn't have to deal with my teenage MC being at school, but it also happened to be 1976 for reasons of the ages of some older characters. And quite late in the writing people started saying, 'Oh, 1976, that was the very hot summer, wasn't it,' which I'd forgotten about. I'd always had that MC as being very sensorily aware, but I started to write in the weather, and it became a really important element of the book, not just the heat, but the dry thunderstorms. Also the cornfields are standing, sun-bleached, at the beginning, and are cut half-way through, and by the end of the story it's all stubble-burning in the dark...

There's a hilarious appendix to Forster's The Art of Fiction, (in the Penguin edition, at least) where he reviews an American academic's dissection of the ways writers use the weather in fiction. It does sound as if the paper was the most po-faced, ploddingly literary kind of lit crit, and Forster is very, very funny about this kind of thing crushing literature beneath its boots even as it tries to investigate. Don't read it if you're inclined to get self-conscious about using the pathetic fallacy, though...

Emma

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tsk!

"the most po-faced, ploddingly literal kind of lit crit,

And there was me thinking you were talking about Anne Summers So, this isn't the Intimate Moments group....

I agree. I think unusual weather can be a strong element in a plot - almost like a character.

I agree about the nostalgia too - unusual weather such as very hot or very cold gives us strong memories and, in fiction, an evocative backdrop to the story.

Deb

I'll have to dust down the Forster again. Maybe it's a British thing too. We're fascinated by weather in the first place because we get so much of it and secondly really hot summers are so rare here that they are seared into our brain cells and we can't avoid writing about them.

All of this has sparked an idea about wind and weird behaviour. I remember from school days how blustery winds somehow sent us all wild during breaktimes.

What you say about wind rings a bell with me too.

And overcast, heavy weather can give a lot of people headaches. I remember one workplace I worked in (a lab) where everyone had a headache the same day, and we realised it was the low pressure weather.

Although I agree that weather interests the British cos we have such variance, I think weather can also be a defining factor for countries where their weather is more stable. It influences culture.

For instance, in many hot countries things are done more slowly, partly through necessity - so culturally their way of life is more laid back (probably mostly changing now, with globalisation). We've all heard of 'Spanish time' and the attitude to time in the Caribbean (I'd fit in well).

And in Northern Europe, like Sweden, many are taciturn, because they lose heat through their mouths if they chat a lot, and of course in winter outside the temps are very low! At least, that's what my Swedish cousin's husband once told me, and I think it makes a great deal of sense.

Deb