‘The Cartographers’ (2022) could’ve been mapped out better

Peng Shepherd’s “The Cartographers” (2022) feels like it was released while still in the drafting stage. In her second novel, her passion for mapmaking – the history, the process and the imagination that real-world and fantasy maps can inspire – comes through. However, it has a remarkable number of roads to nowhere for such a well-regarded novel.

Young and inspired

We follow 35-year-old Nell Young, who works at the ratty offices of Classic, a small NYC outfit that makes fake “aged” wall-hanging maps. Her father, Dr. Young, is revered down the street at the New York Public Library. Both of these buildings evoke the past, with the latter touching upon the old, musty, labyrinthine nature of the New York Museum of Natural History in Preston & Child’s novels (based on the city’s American Museum of Natural History).

Another strength is the mystery, and the dogged way Nell pursues it. In flashbacks to her time as a library intern, she finds a 1930 General Drafting Corporation driver’s map of New York state in the basement’s backlog of donations. She wouldn’t think anything of it, except her dad reacts so badly to her discovery that he yells at her and fires her.

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They become estranged, and when Dr. Young suspiciously dies in the present day, Nell thinks back and wonders if the 1930 map is important. A good scene finds Nell and her ex (and perhaps future) boyfriend Felix perusing the map for a “phantom settlement.” As a copyright trap for bigger mapmakers that might steal their work rather than doing their own surveying, General Drafting included a fake town.

The real-life story of the phantom settlement of Agloe, N.Y., is chronicled in Shepherd’s acknowledgements at the end, and it’s a fascinating highlight. (For another fictional story featuring Agloe, check out John Green’s 2008 novel “Paper Towns” and its film adaptation.)

But “The Cartographers” as a whole does not live up to the cartography intrigue. That’s because Shepherd’s book – although easy to read in line-by-line prose – is clunkily plotted. Many things happen because the plot requires they happen, and she also leaves the biggest mystery unexplained – and mostly unremarked upon.

To delve further, I must institute a SPOILER WARNING.

The big logic holes (Spoilers)

First, Dr. Young gives an extreme reaction to Nell discovering the map that he knows allows access to the secret town of Agloe. He doesn’t want Nell to know about the town, so he fires her and cuts her out of his life! He could have dismissed her finding in a casual manner and kept her employed, and she would’ve been none the wiser about Agloe.

Second, the reason why Dr. Young is terrified of Nell knowing about Agloe is weak. One of his group of seven Cartographer friends – which also included his late wife, Tamara – has been looking for a copy of this map in order to return to Agloe. So what? Dr. Young could just give Wally the map, and be done with it. Yes, Tamara is ensconced in the town (for vague reasons), having faked her death, but Wally has no ill intentions against her. Dr. Young doesn’t know what Wally intends to do in Agloe, but why should he assume something horrible?

Third, we never learn why or how this map leads to the magical town of Agloe. Nor do the characters even wonder about it. Shepherd is caught up on the neat idea of phantom settlements, but not the process by which they become real in her story. Notably, the NYC shop of one of the Cartographers, Romi, is a phantom settlement, accessed via a scribbled map on her business card. So one of the Cartographers themselves has created a phantom settlement – but she never says how, and no one asks her!

In addition to these absurd logic holes, “The Cartographers” has mundane problems. The idea of a town accessed by a magic map is fascinating, but Agloe is boring once we get there. It has the requisite Rockwellian small-town businesses, but zero residents. It’s like the used-up world of Stephen King’s “The Langoliers” – actually rather depressing.

Shepherd could’ve done something here with the notion of possibility. Maybe the real world is bleak for the Cartographers, and they could all secretly settle in Agloe, learning about the town’s magic and using it. What would that life be like? Toward the end, the author introduces the notion that a map created in Agloe can change the real world; this should’ve been established and explored earlier.

More problems (Spoilers)

“The Cartographers” is often overwritten in the wrong way – focusing more on the characters’ personalities than their goals. And the way the past narrative is told is sometimes ridiculous. Various members of the Cartographers recount the events to Nell in first-person past tense. They include details they wouldn’t remember, such as meals, trips to the mailbox and who was holding baby Nell.

Often times, other members of the group are listening when one tells their story to Nell. This leads to a particularly jarring moment where one woman tells of cheating on her boyfriend with another guy in the group, in passionate detail – while the boyfriend is there hearing the story! Granted, he knows about it already, but damn.

END OF SPOILERS.

This is an unusual criticism, but “The Cartographers” goes too heavy on plot and characters. Those are not the author’s strength. Her strength is her passion for maps. If the book had dove deeply into the real history of “phantom settlements” and copyright traps (not that I didn’t appreciate what she does give us), and included more real-world examples of such things, it would’ve been a stronger start.

Moving forward, the novel should have committed to the otherworldly nature of the mysterious town. Instead, Shepherd – via her characters — is apologetic about the very fact that this story is in the fantasy genre. “The Cartographers” is a wonderful idea, but poorly drafted and mapped out; fantastical but not fantastic.