Read via NetGalley and the publisher; it’s out in November 2024.

This is a really neat idea for a book. So much of the “western” world (an idea that Brotton interrogates fairly well) simply assumes that north should be the default direction at the ‘top’ of the map, and that’s how it always has been. AS someone who has deliberately put maps “upside down” and challenged students to think about why – and as someone living in Australia – book that shows exactly how and north doesn’t HAVE to be the default top, and that historically it hasn’t been, is a wonderful thing.

Brotton mingles a lot of different ways of thinking about the world in this book. There’s linguistics – the ways in which different languages’ words for the cardinal directions reflect ideas about the sun, rising and leaving, and other culturally important ideas. Like ‘Orient’: it comes from the Latin for ‘rising’, as in the sun, and came to mean ‘east’… and of course ‘oriental’ has had a long and difficult career. But in English we still orient ourselves in space. Then there’s the connections with various types of weather, in various parts of the world, something I had not considered; and of course there’s an enormous amount of association with mythology from all over the world, often privileging the east and rarely making the west somewhere to be revered. (Three out of four cardinal directions have been regarded as most important over time and space; not the west, though.) Then of course there’s history, as humans learned what was actually out there in various directions, and associated people and places with specific directions (hello, Orient). And the act of cartography itself has had an impact on how people think about direction and the appearance of the world – Mercator, obviously, and the consequences of his projection particularly on Greenland, but even how vellum (real vellum, ie made from calfskin) was shaped and therefore impacted on how things were drawn on it.

Is the book perfect? No, of course not; it’s under 200 pages, it can’t account for every culture and language. But I do think it’s done a pretty good job of NOT privileging European languages; there’s an Indigenous Australian language referenced, which is rare. (I should note that anyone who thinks they can do any sort of navigation by the ‘south polar star’ like you can with the northern one is in for a very, very rude shock.) There is some reference to South American cultures, and I think passing reference to North American ones; some African cultures are also referenced. China and some other Asian societies get more space.

This is a really good introduction to the idea of the four directions having an actual history that is worth exploring for its consequences in our language and our history. The one thing that disappointed me is that there’s no reference to Treebeard’s comment about travelling south feeling like you’re walking downhill, which seems like a missed opportunity.