How landscape shapes character...

How do you decide where to set a novel? And how does that influence the characters in the book? For The Housemaid's Daughter and The Fire Portrait, I travelled to the Karoo to re-discover the landscape my grandparents found on migrating from Ireland to South Africa in the early 1900s. While I had spent childhood holidays in the area, it had been some years since I'd returned. The town of Cradock, where my grandparents settled, became the vivid setting for The Housemaid's Daughter, a story that wove the lives of a fictional Irish family and their housemaid, Ada, into real-life events that took place in the town during the apartheid era.  

But with The Fire Portrait, I chose to create a fictional hamlet called Aloe Glen. I wanted the location to be on the edge of the Karoo, so that Frances, an English artist, would see the transition from the exuberant vegetation of the Cape Peninsula to the dry scrub of the semi-desert. At first, the setting is too harsh for her, and she sees little she wishes to paint. The mountains and hills may be dramatic but there is scant greenery, especially as I learned that the area was racked by drought at the time Frances arrived in the early 1930s. The site I chose, via research on the ground and on Google Earth (!) was a small plateau close to the railway line heading north through the Karoo. 

In both novels, the starkness of the landscape becomes a metaphor for the lives of the heroines but also an inspiration for their future. When Frances begins to look more closely, she finds cryptic stone plants that hug the ground, aloes that send up orange flower spikes, bulbs that bloom briefly when there is rain - and she finds slow acceptance into the initially suspicious community. For Ada, the unforgiving veld becomes a place of escape, an essential refuge from a life torn between the Irish family she loves, the township where she finds her vocation, and the violence of political upheaval. 
I went for the pleasure of being on my own yet part of a company with the birds and small animals.
The air trembled not with massed singing...
but with the heat of the dry veld as it stretched into watery mirages far ahead.