Syuzhet Map

In the spatialisation of narrative for After London Jefferies makes 'time visible and take on flesh' in just the kind of ways Bakhtin refers to in his definition of the chronotope. The syuzhet map shows how the past is a place that can be visited and plotted. Part One, in its ‘Return to Barbarism’ retells a destruction and the recreation myth in miniature. Centring on the forest spaces of Wild England and past England, the narrative moves from sites defined by the past – ruins of old civilisations – through those of natural reclamation – the 'forest', haunts of the horses and pigs –  to those of partial humanisation – 'Bushmen camps', 'enclosures'. Part Two continues this retelling of history through place, this time via a quest romance set against a feudal world of castles, baronies, feasts, and arbours. The bulk of the narrative maps Felix’s journey across the 'great Lake' into the unknown wilderness, the lands of warring tribes, and site of the ruins of 'London'. In this novel, the past really is a foreign country, or an ‘other’ place at least: the temporalised city of ‘after London’ is a toxic wasteland, set apart from the main narrative focus on ‘Wild England’.

The relative simplicity of the syuzhet map when compared to other novels of a similar length is due, in part, to the narrative structure and impulse. Each part of the book adopts a distinct perspective, first that of the historian, then Felix. Both perspectives embody restless forward-moving compulsion, and share a world-building impulse, and this is imaged in the frequently uninterrupted direct movements from place to place. But the way the map combines these two perspectives in one main loop is at odds with the readerly experience and the novel’s form, where Part One supresses the human aspect, and the narrative is driven by something other than character or incident, and Part Two is centred around Felix.