Sense of place

Location is everything in Joyce Carol Oates's The Falls, says John Mullan
The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates
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The Falls is a novel about an American family, observed over the course of three decades, but it is also a novel about a place. The location is Niagara Falls: not just the famous series of waterfalls with its attendant tourist industry, but the city nearby, where its main characters all live.

The falls could hardly be more important to the story: Ariah Burnaby's first husband throws himself into the Horseshoe Falls while they are on their honeymoon; years later her second husband, Dirk, who has embarked on a campaign to reveal municipal corruption, dies when his car is forced off the road and into the rapids above the falls.

But the falls are also a background presence throughout the novel, for the reader as well as for the characters. Naming a novel by its location imparts a metaphoric force to the place. Calling a novel Mansfield Park, or Middlemarch, or Cold Mountain makes us think that the novelist is finding significance in the placing of his or her characters. Oates's characters often think and talk as if location were fate.

For those who live near them, the falls sometimes seem irresistible as a metaphor. Embarking on a series of legal suits against powerful local chemical companies, Dirk Burnaby feels like "one of those early doomed explorers" who had sensed his canoe accelerating and had in fact entered "the Deadline". This is the place in the channel above the falls where, as locals know, it is no longer possible to escape the quickening surge to destruction. A sickening, thrilling image, it keeps returning. Much later, Dirk's son Chandler, involved in a hostage negotiation, exposes himself to a gunman with the same metaphor in his mind. "The roaring in his ears grew louder. He was beyond the Deadline, rapidly approaching the Falls."

The novel is full of lore and legend about the falls. It is a location that Joyce Carol Oates clearly knows well (she grew up not far away). The descriptions of the falls - of the strange effects of light and mist, of the combinations of noise and vibration, of the sense of being "too near to the radiant, thrumming, mad heart of all being" - are done from personal knowledge.

Oates measures that extraordinary effect that was once called the sublime: a pleasurable terror in the face of what dwarfs and overwhelms us. She also observes how the presence of the falls is felt away from the viewing platforms. The city of Niagara Falls has a peculiar micro-climate because of the proximity of the falls. You keep hearing their distant murmur; you keep being reminded of what is just off-screen by the "chill vaporous moisture" in the air, the strange patches of mist that blow from the gorge into the city.

An epigraph from a history of Niagara Falls observes that, by 1900, it had become known as "Suicide's Paradise" ("to the dismay of local citizens"). You might think that there was fatality in it. For the truly desperate, it is obvious what the power of this natural phenomenon is. On the night before he kills himself, Ariah's first husband, Gilbert, lies in his honeymoon suite and hears "the thunderous river" calling to him. Near the end of the book, the teenage Juliet, Ariah's withdrawn daughter, stands at a tourist lookout above the falls, gripping the wet guard-rail, and hears the voices that tell her to throw herself into the roaring rapids. It is the anniversary of her father's death, and the right moment for what has been foreordained.

The locals may resent the association with self-destruction, but they themselves make melodrama out of it. "Her first husband threw himself into the Falls," Chandler's aunt tells him. "And so her second husband was fated to die in the Falls. It had to happen." The Burnaby family seem fixated. As a child, the absentminded Chandler wanders off from the school and is sometimes found on the paths of the Niagara Gorge, gazing into the thundering water. At the beginning of the novel we are given an extract from a "Niagara Falls Physician's Log" from the 19th century, which describes how the sight and sound of the falls makes some behave "as if under the spell of a malevolent hypnotist".

The narrator frequently gazes with one or other of the characters at the terrifying, sublime spectacle. They convince themselves that some inhuman, irresistible force - elementally represented by the falls - has seized them. Oates's novel reaches an ending only by undoing this conviction, lifting the spell of the place.

· John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Join him and Joyce Carol Oates for a discussion on August 13 at the Newsroom, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1. Doors open at 6.30pm. To reserve a ticket (£8, including a glass of wine) call 020 7886 9281 or email A recording of the event will be available at