The Cartographers
Peng Shepherd
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be serious spoilers.
We are all very familiar with the concept of a book that’s so bad it’s good. I now propose a different concept: a book that’s so good I am actually mad I didn’t think of it first. This is the conundrum I faced with The Cartographers, which I was SO SURE was going to be a quick DNF. I am perpetually low on shelf space and I was looking to make more room, and after The Book of M fell flat I was thinking maybe Shepherd just wasn’t the author for me. Unfortunately, by that point I had already bought The Cartographers, so I figured I’d give it three chapters and then it would be an easy unhaul. That was before I found out that this book is fully capable of making me ferociously resent stupid unimportant tasks like eating and bathing and sleeping because they all kept me from finishing the book as fast as I wanted to. Even if there are aspects of the book I wish were better – the awkward prose, for one – this is now one of my all-time favorite books. I don’t think it makes as much sense as Shepherd wants it to make, but I almost don’t care because the story is so wonderfully addicting. Even knowing the answers, I would still read it again and again, and again. I’m so obsessed that I actually put together a dream cast in my brand-new reading journal, which we’ll get to in a bit.
The story seems fairly straightforward at first glance. Born to cartographers Dr. Tamara “Tam” Jasper-Young and Dr. Daniel Young, raised by her father after the presumed death of her mother, Dr. Helen “Nell” Young was well on her way to a lifelong career with the New York Public Library (NYPL) when an argument with her father over a seemingly worthless gas station map ended with her firing. As senior curator of the NYPL Map Division and its most acclaimed scholar, Daniel had the kind of clout that was more than capable of destroying Nell’s career, as well as the career of her now ex-boyfriend, Felix Kimble, who made the gallant mistake of coming to her defense. Where Felix managed to land on his feet with tech giant Haberson Global, Nell became academic poison, and was only saved by Humphrey, the jovial, bearlike owner of Classic Maps and AtlasesTM. Now 35, Nell has spent the last seven years making fanciful, embellished souvenir maps of the kind that people like to hang on their walls for the vibes. She is snooty enough to be deeply ashamed of her job, but also practical enough to recognize that it is, at present, her only way of staying on the outskirts of the industry she loves. Humphrey is more like an uncle to her than a boss and the work is stable, and all in all things are okay, if not amazing.
And so it goes, until Nell is unexpectedly summoned the morning after Daniel is murdered in his office, and the NYPL burgled by a thief who then vanished without a trace. In a secret compartment of his desk, Nell finds the sole clue to the murderer’s wishes: her mother’s leather portfolio, wrapped around the gas station map that ousted her from the NYPL. Furthermore, that one map seems to be the only one left of its kind; all other known copies have been stolen or destroyed, but a group of rabid collectors known as the Cartographers seems to be out to claim every copy it can. This is obviously mysterious as hell, as well as irresistible. Against the earnest pleading of everyone who will still talk to her – so mostly just Daniel’s boss, Albert Swann, and Felix, who reluctantly tags along for the ride in the hopes of reviving their sooooo-over relationship – Nell hides the map from the police and sets out to unravel its mysteries herself. The path is fraught with dangers, however, among them one angry, desperate burglar, who becomes increasingly violent in his quest to secure this one final copy of the map. This is one part of the story.
The other part of the story belongs to Nell’s parents, and to their college friends, who affectionately call themselves the Cartographers. The group starts with just Tam and her childhood bestie, Wally, and goes on to recruit Ramona “Romi” Wu, Daniel, Humphrey “Bear” Turan, Eve Moore, and Francis Bowden, all of them cartographers of the kind of brilliance that has the potential to reshape the industry. After earning their PhDs from the University of Wisconsin, the seven of them pile into two cars, taking two-year-old Nell with them, and set out for upstate New York, where they intend to hole up in a mansion to spend the summer of 1990 putting together a book they call the Dreamer’s Atlas. Though they are all cartographers, each has his or her own specialty: Tam and Romi are artists, for instance, while Wally’s talent lies in an incredibly exacting attention to detail. The Dreamer’s Atlas is a culmination of all of their strengths, a compendium of maps both fantastical and real, drawn in reverse styles – that is, a map of New York City might be drawn in the style used in the Lord of the Rings; a map of Narnia would be drawn in the style of a real-world map. As if that weren’t enough to ensure the success of the atlas, the group is about as tightly knit as any group of seven can expect to be: Tam and Daniel are already married; Romi and Francis are in a pretty serious relationship; and Wally is quietly in love with Tam and will generally go along with anything she says, though this isn’t recognized as a problem until it’s far too late.
The downfall of the Cartographers begins when Tam and Wally buy an antique gas station map for a dollar, and from there stumble across Agloe, a so-called phantom settlement that will show itself only to those who have a copy of the map in hand. Originally written into the map as a copyright trap, Agloe manifests as a ghost town with houses and some retail buildings and a gas station, but it is completely devoid of human life. While the Cartographers recenter the Dreamer’s Atlas around Agloe, which completely consumes them, Wally becomes dangerously obsessed with obtaining every existing copy of the gas station map by any means necessary. The entire project comes crashing down around their ears, literally, when Wally – now convinced that the rest of the group is a threat to Agloe – burns his entire hoard of maps, causing the town to disappear completely with Tam still in it. Unbeknownst to them all, Tam does manage to smuggle one map into Nell’s clothes when she rescues her from the fire, and this is the map that Daniel keeps hidden for the next 25 years, until Nell unknowingly unearths it in the basement of the NYPL on the final day of her ill-fated internship.
All of this is relayed to the adult Nell in bits and pieces as she reconnects with her parents’ oldest friends, who (with the exception of Bear/Humphrey) had previously severed all contact with her according to Daniel’s wishes. This was supposed to keep her safe from Wally, but her ignorance has in fact made her more of a target. In the last three decades, Wally has dropped out of the group and reinvented himself as William Haberson, founder of Haberson Global, though he is meticulous in his efforts to avoid the public gaze. His obsession with Tam remains unshaken, and he has dedicated his life to the creation of the Haberson Map, a creepily all-inclusive digital map that – in its finished state – is supposed to be able to find anything and anyone. The Haberson Map is intended as his part of the discontinued Dreamer’s Atlas, but he has also been chasing down any surviving hard copies of the original gas station map, growing steadily more dangerous as he has learned that he can use other phantom settlements on other maps to more or less disappear into thin air.
This sounds bad, but it isn’t the end. With the rest of her surrogate aunties and uncles behind her, Nell realizes that Daniel kept the map all these years because Tam is still alive in Agloe. Ever persistent, Wally kidnaps Felix and forces Nell to take them all into Agloe, where they find Tam alive and well, and in possession of her own completed half of the Dreamer’s Atlas, which she has spent the last three decades perfecting. Smarting over Tam’s rejection of him, Wally tries to force Nell to upload the gas station map to the Haberson Map, but she instead changes the location of Agloe, causing the town to disappear once again – taking her with it – and leaving Wally with nothing. (Well, not exactly nothing: he gets the criminal record he’s spent the last several decades avoiding when he is finally arrested.) While Tam reunites with her friends, Felix privately mourns his lost relationship with Nell, but wishes her well wherever she is. Here again, though, all is not lost: a little while later, after he’s had some time to settle into his new role as the NYPL’s first geospatial librarian, and after he’s managed to bring his Haberson buddies into his department, Felix receives a private invitation to the relocated Agloe, with the understanding that Nell will open it up to the public in time.
I’m a little ashamed to admit that I now want to buy one of those artsy-fartsy Classic maps that Nell so despises, even if she does come to realize those maps have a place at the table. (Also, I knew Bear was Humphrey. I fucking knew it.) More importantly, though, sign me up for the Dreamer’s Atlas Kickstarter. I’d be throwing my money at them so hard if that atlas were real. This is part of the magic of this book: I can’t say I was particularly invested in maps before, beyond a vague interest in fantasy-realm maps, but Shepherd has made me wish I’d gone to cartography school instead of whatever the hell I’ve been doing for the last couple of decades. I love the concept of a room or a street or a whole town that only appears if you have the right map. I had no idea that phantom settlement copyright traps were a thing, but the idea is fascinating, and it doesn’t even require a lot of explanation or justification. It just is, and if you get it, you get it. I originally had some confusion around the mechanisms that trigger the disappearance of the town and its ability to keep people in it, but I think I get it now. At the time of Tam’s seeming death, she had already begun work on a map of Agloe, and so presumably was still able to see the town while the others lost their shared copy; and Nell was the only person who knew where she had moved the town, because she was the one who moved it. If I squint it makes a sort of sense, though if this is indeed the truth then it would also follow that every person would have needed to be looking at a map of Agloe every moment of every day in order to keep the town within their sights – no?
The funny thing is that I don’t really care about the answer to either of those questions, because I’m having a harder time making sense of the plot. The thing is, I really really really want to know why the Cartographers didn’t just turn Wally over to the police 32 years ago, before he transitioned from serial burglary to serial killing. “Because then there wouldn’t be a book” is not a good answer. Neither is “Because they’re bEsT fRiEnDs!” Bullshit. Best friends don’t spend decades underground to avoid that one best friend who went around the twist. Romi literally trashed her own professional reputation to keep Wally from targeting her. Daniel raised his daughter in relative isolation. Tam was completely alone for three decades with nothing but a partially finished map for company, because for some reason mapping Agloe was more important than watching her daughter grow up?!?!?! I swear, these scholars will literally spend 30 years in a ghost town before they go to therapy. I get the part where she felt unsafe around Wally, but that’s why I’m suggesting that Wally should’ve gone to prison three decades earlier. His worship of her goes beyond the borders of the sympathetic and becomes something dark and aggressive, and, more importantly, provably criminal. I don’t feel like it would’ve been impossible to prove his involvement in the burglaries, unless they were afraid his obscenely wealthy family would retaliate. I don’t know if this is a reasonable concern or not. We never see Wally’s family.
I wish I could be more sympathetic towards Wally than I am, but he’s a stalker and a murderer, and death to stalkers, etc, etc, so that’s that. I really did feel for him in the beginning, though, particularly when he admitted that he knew he couldn’t have Tam all to himself, but he so badly wanted to have just one little thing that was just for the two of them. That broke my heart. I can understand him wanting a sweet little secret town that nobody else knew about besides him and his very best beloved. Maybe I just have an unreasonable soft spot in my heart for potentially asexual characters: Wally’s interest in Tam never seemed physical, though it could just be that he never had the courage to act on that kind of desire. Even though he is an unsympathetic character in many ways, I do like that he never gets into an Alpha Boi fight with Daniel. He accepts that Tam will love other people than himself, even if he isn’t exactly happy about it. He tries to find a compromise, but it all just goes so wrong in the end and I want to weep, because at the end of the day I really do love these characters, even Wally, or at least I did before he fell out of the coconut tree. I love Nell and Felix despite their painfully awkward second (and third, and fourth)-chance romance, but I also love Swann – I cried when he died, godDAMMIT WALLY – and Romi and Eve and Francis and especially Humphrey omg he is a cupcake and I even love Tam even though I still think it was pretty shitty to let her best friends mourn her for 30 years.
As for Daniel, I want to kick him, because he could have headed off a lot of danger in Nell’s future if he’d just told her the goddamn truth to begin with instead of burying it deep and promising himself he’d tell her when the time was right. There was never going to be a right time. How was he planning to get word from Tam, anyway? Messenger pigeon? Or was he just going to take Nell to Agloe out of the blue and tell her everything then? Here again, I know he wanted to keep her safe from Wally, but it seems to me that ignorance is incapable of protecting itself, and the best defense against Wally would have been complete knowledge. If he’d started when she was young, shown her the hidden rooms and explained the workings of the phantom settlements, maybe she would have been more receptive when Francis finally tried to warn her about Wally several years later. Of course, it is Nell, so maybe she wouldn’t have been. We’ll never know either way.
All the same, I want to believe that Nell could have grown up with a more receptive mind. She is fairly difficult to root for in the beginning. Her insistence on keeping the gas station map to herself is frustrating at best; likewise her complete, unshakable confidence that she is 100% correct all day every day. To be completely fair, the tendency to steamroller opposition is more of a family flaw than a Nell flaw because her dad did it too, and that isn’t to say that she is completely devoid of charm. She isn’t too stuck in her ways. I do appreciate her “Who the hell did I think I was?” moment, late in the book though it is, and I like her scrappiness, her unswerving determination, her desire to protect the people who are important to her. I wish her and Felix a long and happy life together. They’ve spent more than enough time fighting. I feel like there needs to be a rainbow at the end of all that.
P.S. Here’s the reading journal literally nobody asked for, with the Cartographers dream cast that is also thus far completely unrequested.
The bulk of the reading journal is still under construction, but I’m pretty fucking happy with how this spread came out.
Click to enlarge.
Am I mixing cartoon characters with actual actors and one reality-star-who-is-mostly-an-ordinary-citizen? You absolutely fucking bet I am, because this is my fantasy cast, goddammit. Yes, yes, I am aware that Quentin is not an actor (so far as I know), but his is the face I happened to picture when I was reading Felix’s chapters and I also cast the Jack Frost kid from Rise of the Guardians as Wally even though I’ve never actually seen that movie, so we’ve got some larger problems here. I have absolutely nothing to say in my own defense except that that’s how I pictured Wally and I have no idea why. I can 100% see Charles Dance as Old Wally, tho. He’s got that menacing glower.
P.P.S. Okay, the prose really bothers me.
What the hell is this?
He’d told them everything he knew so far – except what Nell had said Francis revealed was the real reason the map was so valuable.
The book is not made up of jumbled word salad sentences like this, which is fortunate because I would never have made it through the whole thing if it were, but what the hell is this? Most of the time Shepherd’s prose is perfectly fine, but every now and then there’s a sentence so clumsy and so awkward it gives me severe secondhand cringe. This is driving me crazy. This book could have been great, but it has to settle for merely good.
