Phantom Maps

The Cartographers. Peng Shepherd. Orion 2022. Reviewed by Phil Cohen

In the author’s preface, Peng Shepherd has this to say:

“We tend to think of maps as perfectly accurate—after all, that’s the point of them. What good would a map that lied be? But in fact, many maps do just that. Unbeknownst to almost everyone who unfolds one and trusts it to take them to where they want to go, there’s a long-standing secret practice among cartographers of hiding intentional errors—phantom settlements—in their works. Most of the time, these intentional errors are so small and well disguised, they’re never found. But every once in a while, a phantom settlement doesn’t stay a phantom. Sometimes, something magical happens.”

So far, so commonplace to readers of Livingmaps Review. The use of fake places on maps as copyright traps to prevent plagiarism is a well-known feature of professional cartographic practice. And one whose literary possibilities have already been explored in John Green’s Young Adult novel, Paper Towns. Conversely, the creation of literary fiction around places that do actually exist as physical entities, but have somehow escaped being officially mapped, is well illustrated in Garrison Keillor’s stories about Lake Wobegon. 

Like Paper Towns, The Cartographers focuses on the famous case of Agloe, a phantom hamlet devised as a copyright trap in the 1930s by a map making company in the United States, who assigned it to a dirt-road intersection in the Catskill Mountains outside New York city. But that was not the end of the story. In the 1950s, a shop was built at the intersection and was given the name Agloe General Store because the name was on the Esso roadmaps of the period. Subsequently, Agloe appeared on another map produced by Rand McNally. The mapmaker got the name from the Delaware County administration who had it registered as a real place. When Esso threatened to sue Rand McNally for the assumed copyright infringement, the latter pointed out that the place now actually existed in the material form of the store and therefore no infringement had taken place. Eventually the store went out of business, but Agloe continued to appear on maps, including Google maps up until its recent redaction. Furthermore, the United States Geological Survey added ‘Agloe (Not Official)’ to the Geographic Names Information System database on February 25, 2014. 

Perhaps this might be viewed as a test case for the post-structuralist assertion that the map not only precedes, but performatively inscribes and re-constructs the territory; conveniently omitting to mention that it was the physical construction of a store as a material sign and not just the act of its naming that created the conditions for this to happen. For Peng Shepherd, Agloe is an invitation to explore the multiple realities that maps can evoke and a key to decipher the curious inter-textuality that comes into play in comparing one with another:    

“The whole point of Agloe is that it doesn’t appear anywhere else but on a cheap little map, so we can’t refer to another one or look it up in our database …” “There’s not much online either,” Priya confirmed. “Some old sales for possible copies like you found earlier, but nothing about its secret value—or the actual location of the town.” Felix stopped—an idea occurred to him. “Let’s set the Haberson Map to look for Agloe,” he suggested.

The Haberson map is a key actant in the unfolding of the plot. It represents the capacity of digital mapping technologies to store and visualise enormous data sets. Here is how its role is described: 

“It would be not just unfathomably gigantic, but also graceful, each piece of information so well integrated into the whole that the map would be like music. A symphony. A geographical program capable of containing in one massive depiction every single stream of data from every single arm of the company. Haberson Global had medical consultancies, urban planning teams, mass transit tracking, interior design apps, weather charts, internet search programs, social media, food and grocery delivery, sleep monitoring, flower bloom patterns, endangered species migration routes—all of it would feed into the map, more information from more sources than ever possible before, through the algorithm the team was designing.”

One of the themes running through the book is the double-edged nature of this kind of hi-tech cartography, and the risk that it might end up not just totalising the data but transforming it into a totalitarian knowledge platform that would erode, if not completely destroy more human liberatory possibilities.

This is from a dialogue between Nell, the key human protagonist and avatar for the authorial voice, and one of her friends who is an enthusiastic advocate of cartograms: 

“The Haberson Map isn’t just any map, Nell. Combined with the one you’re holding it could be even greater. Imagine a map that not only showed every corner of the world, down to the most minute detail, but would let you control it, as well. A map that would allow you to improve reality by changing its lines.” He looked at her. “A map that is perfect.” Nell took another helpless step back. What Wally had built wasn’t a map. Maps were love letters written to times and places their makers had explored. They did not control the territory—they told its stories. But there could be no stories in Wally’s Haberson Map. If he could hold this secret place captive on his server and use it to shuffle the rest of the world around on a whim, rearranging reality in whatever way he needed, that was not a story. That was not love. Wally extended his hand, inviting. What were maps for? “To bring people together,” Nell finally answered.”

Nell is the daughter of the chief map curator at the New York Public Library, her mother also being a notable cartographer. But this is no family romance about following in parental footsteps. As an intern she discovers an apparently insignificant road map in a dusty corner of the NYPL archive and brings it to her father’s attention only to find that he is enraged by her ‘meddling’ and promptly gets her fired. Subsequently, she discovers that all copies of this particular map have disappeared from map collections across the country, being marked either lost, stolen, or not available in the online catalogues. She then embarks on a quest to unravel this mystery, which gives the story much of its momentum. Her line of enquiry leads Nell into an underworld of map collectors and dealers, in particular a secret society named ‘The Cartographers’, whose role remains ambiguous until the end. The author is especially good at evoking the shared obsession of map makers and collectors, and the hermetic worlds they inhabit. 

This quest to unravel the clues to Agloe’s secret location and thus unlock the keys to its inhabitation, is woven into a family psychodrama centred on Nell’s early childhood. The plot is further thickened by the introduction of a murder investigation – her father dies at his desk in mysterious circumstances, followed by several other deaths linked to the missing maps. This imbrication of noirish detective story with an account of archival research within the narrative frame of a bildungsroman is an ambitious venture. Borges was a past master at the genre, as too was Umberto Eco. Sadly. Shepherd is not in the same league. The novel is flagged as ‘magical realism’ but anyone expecting a poetic evocation of the subliminal or uncanny aspects of everyday encounters with the material world, à la Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Ben Okri, is going to be in for a big disappointment. Here is a description of Nell entering the fictional/real world of Agloe”

“I stepped forward and inspected the sign. The nails were long rusted, and there was a fine layer of grime on the face of the metal itself that clearly indicated it hadn’t somehow been put up in the single day we’d been at the house. It was old. It had been there all this time. And it also definitely had not been. And the name on the sign matched the name on the map. Welcome to Agloe Home of the famous Beaverkill Fishing Lodge!”

This is realism without the magic, and in fact the book is best read and appreciated as a fast-paced thriller, immersing us in its various mapworlds, some of which are visually illustrated in the text to good effect. For anyone wanting to escape from the horrific entanglements of map and territory now going on in war torn Ukraine, Peng Shepherd’s novel offers an entertaining journey across the Badlands of the cartographic imaginary, with the certainty that Good will prevail in the end. Which is perhaps why the novel’s ending feels such a let-down.

Here is how the denouement is unpacked by Nell’s mentor:

“I already knew Agloe existed only within its map—and so was visible only when the map was being used. It was why we had to open it and follow the road into and out of the town each time, rather than navigating by sight or memory. And when I’d folded up and hidden the map on you, Nell, I sealed the town away from you, your father, and all our friends. It disappeared because they could no longer see it on the map, because they no longer knew where the map was. And they also didn’t know that I’d just barely begun my own copy of it right before that terrible day and had it here with me, inside Agloe”

He goes on:

“My theory, impossible as it was, had been right all this time. A map could make things real—literally. I realized that I could use my skills as a cartographer to save myself and the town. That if I made a map of part of the town using the printing press, I could change Agloe with it. It would become real within its map, just like Agloe was within its own. Buildings could have furniture in them. Shops could have provisions. And more. At first, I used the press only to stay alive. I mapped places onto my draft of Agloe to make what I needed to appear in the town. I drew a restaurant to get water and food, a clinic to get bandages and medicine, and a clothing store to get new, unscorched clothes. But after my basic necessities had been satisfied, after my lungs cleared and I’d started to heal, I began to realize there was something much more important to consider than simply surviving and hiding.”

So, what is that something more? The novel ends with a bland invocation to map making as a way of ‘bringing people together’. This is how it is put:

“Cartography, at its heart, was about defining one’s place in the world by creating charts and measurements. Nell had lived her life by that idea, that everything could be mapped according to references and thereby understood. But she could see now that she had been paying attention to the wrong references. It was not a map alone that made a place real. It was the people.”

To this reader at least, such sententious populism seemed to translate into something straight out of the playbook of the metaverse, that online dream world of inter-active do-it-yourself consumerism, which is currently being designed by Mark Zuckerberg and Co. for us to inhabit while the planet goes into meltdown. In the outside world wildfires may rage, floods and hurricanes devastate cities, famine may stalk hitherto fertile land, and neither life nor livelihood can be guaranteed, but never mind, we can put on our headsets and immerse ourselves in our own personally customised Agloe- mapping our every desire into a virtual reality world of plenty for all. You may be homeless or jobless, but as long as you can still afford to be connected to the metaverse, you can live in the house or work in the job of your dreams. 

Perhaps in different authorial hands, the book’s promising initial premise, that maps can open up other possible worlds than those they officially depict, might have lent itself to a more imaginative materialism. The graphic novels of Schuiten and Peeters, for example, Invisible Frontier (2Vols) point the way. Meanwhile, if you are looking for an entertaining page-turner for your get away Easter break, I can thoroughly recommend The Cartographers.