We slowly enter a gallery with many drawings displayed, each framed and situated adjacently on the walls. The narrator tells us that Tulse Luper arranged all the drawings for him while he was ill. The narrator tells us about some of the drawings, some given to him, some stolen, one of them stolen by him.
We then arrive at a drawing that Tulse Luper says the narrator will probably need first. The drawing is focused on, Michael Nyman’s familiar music starts to play, and, on Tuesday morning, at a quarter to two, the journey begins.
The places are described; a scarlet brick road initially leads through them. Tulse Luper suggested the narrator’s journey through H needed 92 maps, and the time to decide what H stood for was at the end of the journey, and by that time, it scarcely mattered. By the time the thirteenth map is reached, the preceding maps begin to fade, each now bears a cross-shaped mark. It could be a signpost or a skeleton of a windmill. Maps are fading and the narrator is now running through H.
The maps cease fading. We soon reach the Amsterdam map, which previously belonged to the keeper of the owls at the Amsterdam zoo, Van Hoyten. Van Hoyten is now a bird counter. Different birds are now shown to us at brief intervals. The journey continues through the remaining diverse maps. Eventually, on Tuesday morning, at a quarter to two, the destination is reached. The narrator has travelled through 92 maps and covered 1,418 miles.
A lady in the gallery gets up from her desk, puts on her coat, and leaves. She had been reading a book called Some Migratory Birds of the Northern Hemisphere by Tulse Luper, 92 Maps, 1,418 Birds in Colour.
“I’ve always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going – in a sense it’s three tenses in one. It’s also an amazing ideogram of information that is very useful and, perhaps most pertinently, also not at all useful. My father had recently died, and the subtitle of the film was ‘The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist’ – my father was one. Through his life he had amassed an extraordinary amount of information about bird study, and I was very aware that with his death – as indeed with any death – a vast amount of very personalized information had gone missing, was totally irrecoverable. The film is on the journey a soul takes at the moment of death, to whatever other place it ends up – H being either Heaven or Hell. I devised 92 maps to help this particular character get there. The whole film was divided into five sections that represented movement from a very urban landscape to a wilderness landscape, and there were references and cross-references to all sorts of systems.”
- Peter Greenaway on A Walk Through H
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