Birmingham: A City of Thrilling Literature

I'm reading Love in the Time of Cholera at the moment, which is proving to be quite an arduous task with lots of stuff going on in my life (getting married in two weeks!). The book is mostly making me pine to go back to South America, as the city-setting reminds me a lot of the wonders of Lima and Cusco in Peru, places littered with bustling little back-alley shops with buckets of meat hung out the front, and wild dogs mooching around looking for a feed. These are places ripe for readers to get lost in: whether you've visited anywhere similar or not, the settings are so vibrant they eat you alive and you have to live in them until you stop reading and they spit you out. More and more I find that I'm choosing the books I read based on their settings, and I particularly love cities, both places I've already visited and those that I've never been to. It makes me wonder if my novel's setting of Birmingham, the drabbest city I've ever seen, is really going to spark the imagination of readers. I don't think I've ever read a novel that sets even a second of its action in Brum; perhaps the history of literature is trying to tell me something.

In fact, the only book I can think of that is set around here is The Rotter's Club by Jonathan Coe, a Birmingham-born writer who wisely sets most of his work in London. Maybe I should read that and see if there's anything of Birmingham that Coe doesn't cover that's worth committing to the page. I'm thinking maybe I should set my book in a better city, but there must be something about Birmingham that makes it important to house my story. I just hope the setting can inspire people to pick it up, to think "ooh, wow, a book set in Birmingham, that sounds like a thrilling place for characters to live", and then travel from all over the world to stare at the wonders depicted in my novel, such as the horrible Broad Street. It's the kind of place that becomes very small and dull after a couple of months of living here, but surely it's got to hold enough interest for an unfamiliar reader to live in, especially if I can convincingly get the Brummie accent onto the page.