That is a cardinal value in judging a written work. In Dickens' description of the journey on horseback up Shooter's Hill in A Tale of Two Cities, I was transported, I could see the steam from the horses' nostrils. I could see and feel the creep of fog up the hill.
I get transported to the scene, so that I am not aware of my contemporary setting, in great works of fiction; rarely in histories. Robert Caro can write luminously, though his subject matter is often deadening.But on page 88 of Master of the Senate he does that rare thing and transported me.
The corridors were silent. ...so empty were they that often there was no voice to be heard, and you would be walking down a corridor in a silence broken only by the click of your heels on the marble floor and the distant pings of elevator bells...
