The New Nature Writers: An Encounter

 

The invitation appeared in my inbox some weeks ago. The very week, in fact, that I had been grappling with questions about how to represent the land-as-character in my fiction, how to give it a voice that was pre-historic, pre-linguistic, while still using words (and not, as a friend put it, sound like a yoghurt weaving vegan fundamentalist). The email offered a conference on the ‘new nature writing’ hosted by Bath Spa University and the opportunity for me to explore this unfamiliar new frontier. It was a classic case of synchronicity – serendipity indeed.

The conference didn’t disappoint. It was a fascinating (exciting even) day of discussion amongst a small group of thirty-odd writers, activists, artists, journalists and poets concerned with how to leverage their combined and considerable talent and their obsession(s) with nature to tackle the urgent issues of climate change and environmental degradation.

As I drove through the summer lanes on my journey there, it hadn’t occurred to me that I might actually be drawn in to a community of writers, inspired by their integrity.


We had Richard Kerridge’s brilliant introduction to the new nature writing’s scuffles with the Romantic sublime, localism and scientific discourse. Brett Westwood of the BBC Natural History unit urged us to eschew jargon and embrace complexity with new languages designed to engage and ‘reach out to the heart’ of audiences. John Vidal spoke to the importance of the new nature writer’s position ‘outside looking outside,’ beyond the industrial and commercial interests that have and continue to ‘corrupt' nature, as well as the mega-NGOs that are supposed to serve it. A seriously smart operator, it would be easy to dismiss Vidal on first meeting as a buffoon, an entertaining relic from the school of ‘60s journalism, but that would be a big mistake. He knows what he's talking about. Melanie Challenger was, I thought, unduly hard on herself and her achievements as she talked of the difficulties and pitfalls of ‘making a difference’ while Paul Evans silenced the room and gladdened our hearts with a moving and lyrical meditation on an ancient, local yew tree. He deserves his reputation as one of the most enthralling writers of our times.

The question of language was central to all of our discussions – how to name things, how to use that naming to enchant and reach out and advocate for the environment. What is critical here – and evidenced so wonderfully by Paul Evans’ reading – is the importance of communicating the particularity of one’s experience, of speaking with a unique voice, inhabiting authenticity.

But what was also critical was this question of how writers can ‘make a difference.’  Coming at this as a complete novice, it seemed to me that the new nature writers, like so many people with very specific expertise, were so involved in tying themselves up in philosophical and idealist knots that they fail to see the ‘difference’ that they can make as staged, specific, small and of necessity short term. It seemed to me it was about expectations and I wanted to cry out to them and say, that the idea of ‘making a difference’ was way too big an idea. Speak to any successful campaigner or advocate and they will tell you that their targets are very particular, often small-scale, approached with the recognition that achieving those targets will enable them to step up and move on to bigger and bigger things over time. Unsatisfactory and frustrating as this can be, particularly to the idealist, it can offer a genuinely radical and achievable change agenda that is sustainable in the long term.

I was left with so much to think about, from the nature of personal responsibility in an age of environmental emergency, to the idea that the practice of being a ‘new nature writer’ must just be a complete and utter bloody blast – all that tramping about in ancient woodlands, slapping around on wet sand at low tide, lying prone in long summer grass hoping for a sighting of the Lesser Speckled Tit Warbler.

My encounter with the new nature writers left me enriched and with my eyes wide open to the nature we have now, as well as the nature that’s to come. I went on my way as a member of a new network to which I hope I can find something worth contributing. I also left feeling relief, that here was a group of genuinely decent, grounded individuals with a passion for the world around them and an extraordinary gift to convey that in some of the most brilliant prose I have heard for some time. For once, here was a series of readings that had me actively listening from beginning to end. And not a yoghurt weaving vegan fundamentalist in sight.

Review: Chris Cleave's The Other Hand

Plagued by the stereotypes and tropes of the African continent this is an uneven book that feels like it’s been written by numbers.   

The characters are dislikeable, the storylines unbelieveable – and I really wanted to believe them but they were just too ‘pat.’ The narrative didn’t have the detail, tone or style that make a story sing.  For anyone who’s spent any time in Nigeria, so much of the detail is incorrect – as if the implied European reader can be hoodwinked, as if no one from Nigeria would actually read it themselves. There is a ridiculous marketing ploy on the back cover that won’t tell you what the book’s about because it’s so incredible and about-to-change-the-world and builds the book up to a level it can’t possibly attain. And falls very far short of. 

There is a four year old son whose persistently ungrammatical speech sounds just like padding and is far more annoying than it is endearing. There is the central character Little Bee who we are expected to believe can be naïve village girl one moment, then wise African mama the next and it simply isn’t convincing. There is the monumentally dull character Lawrence. And there is Sarah, about whom we should care very much, but don’t. The twists and turns in the plot feel like brutal devices to push the story further but do nothing to add depth to character or theme. I hate to barrack another writer when I know how much hard work goes into a novel but it's not often a book annoys me this much – I’m so glad it’s over.

How To Write About the West Country

Always talk about the West Country as if it were a single place, the rustic wilds beyond the M4 corridor aspic-ed in real ale and cream teas. You wonder where it begins and ends – does it include Dorset? The Cotswolds? Shrug off concern with geographic precision and waste no more time. No one really cares. When writing about the West Country, litter your prose with adjectives and phrases such as ‘timeless landscape,’ ‘rolling hills,’ ‘blousy hedgerows,’ ‘rough banks’ and ‘lush meadows.’  It is the land of long grasses, wildflowers and larks.

Never show West Country characters as well-rounded, intelligent individuals (unless they live in Bristol and listen to triphop – see below).  They have neither the technology nor the brainpower to invent, create or pioneer any products or services that others might want. Except cheese. They live like Laurie Lee in a bucolic paradise where the second world war has not yet happened.

People in the West Country generally fall into two camps: wurzels or aristos. Aristos wear pink trousers or have hair like Princess Anne, spend their weekends hunting and are, naturally, to be despised. They are the polo-playing jetset, appearing each week in the backpages of Country Life magazine. Tory politicians, hedge fund managers with weekend cottages and celebrities are a subset of this camp. There are no subsets of the former camp, though a query remains over women wearing round-toed sandals, patchouli and knitted rainbow scarves. They are usually addled on homegrown.

Everybody in the West Country is white – unless they are immigrants funnelled into urban centres where children point at them in the street and parents respond with unabashed, frowny stares. In exceptional circumstances, immigrants can be white and from Eastern Europe.  These people steal jobs from the locals, live in static caravans on farms with upturned trolleys in the yard and are known for stealing the road-signs to sell as scrap.

Young people are to be seen as dim, deprived and disenfranchised. They are trapped in a monotonous wasteland of arable or dairy farming from which they feel alienated and thus race around in pimped-up Ford Escorts, an action which inevitably leads to early and tragic death in an RTA.  Grey-faced, football-shirted fathers shake their heads in graveyards as young girls lay solitary red roses and sentimental cards written in big round letters with circles over every ‘i.’ Girls / young women never feel alienated like this. They are too busy nursing their multitudinous babies and sponging off the state. This is the endgame for the lusty wench, last seen serving ale in pewter tankards and lolloping her breasts over unlaced corsets under the rafters of roadside taverns.

No one you’d ever want to write about lives in a provincial town. Nor do they live in the following cities: Gloucester, Exeter, Cheltenham, Truro, Taunton or Bath (especially not Bath). They can, however, live in Bristol. In Bristol, they listen to triphop and may go to edgy warehouse raves in St. Paul’s. St Paul's is to be treated as per Peckham or Brixton – transfer cultural references across (no one will notice). In Bristol, they have art and art-house cinema and arty music which they listen to /watch / look at in horn-rimmed spectacles and ethical jumpers. They have been to the dark side.

People who live in the middle of nowhere are likely criminal and not to be trusted. Unless they are downshifters from London who’ve gone west to start a small-holding. These people are romantic idealists, idiots in dungarees with double-barrelled surnames.

Make knowing jokes about sheep and lonely men living in valleys.  Or bring it bang up to date with a scene about dogging in gravel pit car-park. 

West Country people spend their time at village fetes, farmer’s markets or car boot sales. The knowledge they all drink cloudy cider hardly bears repeating, so well understood is this fact. The only people who don’t drink cloudy cider are middle aged card-carrying members of CAMRA with beards and leather jerkins. This demographic accounts for a high proportion of wurzels and may be linked to the women in round-toed sandals.

None of this applies to Cornwall, which is equivalent to London with a coastline and must be treated accordingly. People there go surfing before breakfast, eat lots of mackerel (cooked by Rick Stein) and have bunting permanently strung between the trees in their gardens.

Finally, conspire with your reader by adopting a patronising tone when talking about people from the West Country - never countenance the possibility that they might be reading your book / article / blogpost too. Don’t be afraid to cash in a bit of nostalgia capital - end your book / article / blogpost wistfully with a quote from WH Davies about life being incomplete without having the time to stand and stare. 

(with apologies to Binyavanga Wainana)

Pearl Farming in Anglesey

Pearl Soap.  I haven’t seen it for years, but it was the best Llangefny Asda had to offer so it ended up in the shopping trolley for our weekend’s writing retreat on Anglesey.  It reminds me so much of home, of my mum, of clean white sheets and thick towels that have been tumble dried, of the caramel coloured wool carpet on the landing outside the bathroom, the shaft of light from the skylight, the motes of decades-old dust tumbling and spinning in the sun. 

The house is quiet this morning, the writers like molluscs cradling and growing their own pearls in the mantle of their minds.  The rush and pull of breakfast is now past, leaving in its wake a calm shore of scattered shells, the click-clack-click of crustaceans scuttling over the tideline in search of a sandy lee to tend their precious cargo.


For more details on our WritingSpace retreat, click here.

'Catch me if you can' - Point of View As Character III

Point of View as Character

In the last blog post I looked at how Toni Morrison and John Steinbeck use omniscient viewpoints in their fiction as a principle tool of character building. Morrison's work shows us how that seemingly god-like point of view can be manipulated and flexed depending on how the writer wants us to see character. This flexibility in third person point of view is something I want to explore more now in a brief look at Ross Raisin’s Waterline (2011).[1] I’ll then turn to Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn and a discussion of point of view as characterisation through a close reading of that novel. 

Waterline is written in very close third person Glaswegian vernacular and follows the decline of Mick, an ex-ship builder devastated by the recent death of his wife.  The narrator ‘goes into character’ and yet remains outside of Mick, the lead protagonist. Early in the novel, as Mick begins his retreat from his family and his life and starts drinking heavily, he takes to sleeping in the garden shed:

He is cold. He has lain there with the covers pulled up all morning and there’s nay chance he’s tweaking the door open so he’ll have to live with the smell just – the clinging stink of a fish supper he brought back a few days ago. A while later but he is too thirsty, and he does get up, leaving the shed to go for a drink of water from the kitchen. (W, p.71)

 

Point of view enables us to see the world as Mick does; we can hear his voice clearly in the text, even in this short passage. So what does Raisin achieve by using third person? Given the extreme closeness of this narrative point of view, why didn’t he elect to use first person? And what effect does this choice have on the way character is choreographed in Waterline?

The use of words and phrases such as ‘nay chance,’ ‘tweaking,’ ‘live with the smell just’ and ‘a while later but,’ put us firmly in the hands of a distinctive colloquial voice that filters experience with a conversational, intimate style; and yet this third person perspective inserts a gap between Mick and the reader.  The ‘clinging stink of a fish supper’ implies judgement.  We know that Mick brought it back to the shed because the narrative tells us he did, but there is a distancing in that phrase, signalled by the word ‘stink.’  Unlike ‘smell,’ stink suggests the unpleasant odour associated with the kind of rough-sleeping alcoholic that Mick will turn into later in the novel. The word is a foreshadowing, still part of Micks’ own point of view, while at the same time separate from him. 

The third person point of view tells us something else about Mick.  As we get to know him, we realise that he would be an unlikely chronicler of his own life, would never assume to tell his own story using the first person pronoun,’I.’ Indeed, the novel traces Mick’s attempts to efface, even destroy, himself – at the moment when he travels to London and moves into seedy lodgings before he starts sleeping rough, he literally disappears to all that are known to him.  He turns up sporadically on the record books of Social Services in London and this is evidenced in a few episodic chapters written from an institutionalised viewpoint – like Steinbeck and Morrison, Raisin flexes the perspective when necessary. Overall, the close third person point of view enables Raisin to construct a kind of fictional biography, while the carefully chosen verbal ticks and colloquialisms help ground Mick and his story within the time and place and the legacy of Thatcher’s post-industrial Britain that is so key to the circumstances of Waterline.

James Wood calls this close third person point of view ‘free indirect style,’ which he says is at its most powerful when ‘hardly visible or audible’:

As soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character, wants to merge with that character, to take on his or her way of thinking and speaking … The narrative seems to float away from the novelist and take on the properties of the character, who now seems to ‘own’ the words … Thanks to free indirect style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s eyes and language too.  We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once.[2]

With free indirect style, we simultaneously see through the character’s eyes and are encouraged to see more than they see. This gap can be a source of creative tension, enabling character and their worldview to be seen from different perspectives, be that their own, how other characters see them, how the author-narrator suggests we see them and the world of the novel. 

Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (2009) pegs free indirect style to Eilis Lacey, the protagonist whose journey we follow as she emigrates from Ireland to New York in the 1950s.[3] There is a restraint to the close third person point of view that illuminates Eilis’s character. Father Flood, the priest who later arranges for Eilis to emigrate, comes to tea:

He crossed his legs and sipped his tea from the china cup and said nothing for a while. The silence that descended made it clear to Eilis what the others were thinking. She looked across at her mother, who deliberately, it seemed to her, did not return her glance, but kept her gaze fixed on the floor.  Rose, normally so good at moving the conversation along if they had a visitor, also said nothing.  She twisted her ring and then her bracelet. (Bk, p.23)

Subtly, swiftly and almost imperceptibly, Eilis is ushered towards her emigration – from the moment Rose returns from the golf club having played a round with Father Flood to the moment he sends Mrs Lacey a letter confirming that he has found Eilis an appointment and accommodation in New York, the narrative barely covers three pages. The silence described in the above passage, along with the quiet yet quick decisions that are made for Eilis elegantly characterise her lack of control and passivity.

Narrative point of view in Brooklyn ebbs and flows gently between a very close, almost interior standpoint and a more exterior, outward looking perspective (and along the delicate gradations between those two banks). On the first day in her new job at Bartocci’s department store in New York,

Eilis watched as Miss Fortini wrote out several dockets for her and sent them and then waited for them to return.  She then filled some out herself, the first for a single item purchased, the second for a number of the same item, and the third for a complicated mixture of items. Miss Fortini stood over her as she did the addition.

‘It’s better to go slowly and then you won’t make mistakes,’ she said.

Eilis did not tell Mrs Fortini that she never made mistakes when she did addition.  Instead, she worked slowly, as she had been advised, making sure the figures were correct. (Bk, p.61)

Here we see the face that Eilis wants to show the world. Narrative point of view is focused on tasks, enabling Eilis to demonstrate her capabilities to her new boss.  The voice is practical, wary, contained. A similar distancing effect is achieved when we realise that the farewell scene as Eilis sets out on her journey has been omitted from the narrative.  Instead we find her handing her suitcase over to a ship’s porter whom she thanks ‘in a tone warm and private but also slightly distant though not shy either, a tone used by a woman in full possession of herself (Bk, p.32). Although the scene is later recounted in flashback, the omission is significant – it protects Eilis’s privacy, avoids the showy melodrama of an emotional farewell to her mother and sister.  As we saw in Beloved, the unsaid carries subtle power.

The narrative perspective becomes more interior at those moments when Eilis is least ‘in possession’ of herself.  This occurs when she recounts her dreams (Bk, p.67), has sex for the first time with her sweetheart Tony (pp.185-7), or is at her most homesick:

It was like hell, she thought, because she could see no end to it, and to the feeling that came with it, but the torment was strange, it was all in her mind, it was like the arrival of night if you knew that you would never see anything in daylight again. (Bk, p.70).

While the narrative ‘bends round’ Eilis throughout the novel, there is a plasticity to the point of view that allows Toibin to create empathy and intimacy while maintaining a distance that not only orchestrates character, but reminds us of the period, the emigrant’s lot, the necessity and demeanour of a single girl’s respectability.  The free indirect style almost acts as a means of narrative enquiry into Eilis’s life and character – an omniscient point of view that moved between characters would undermine this focus.

            I recently wrote to Toibin to ask him why he did not write the novel in first person and was surprised when he replied to me! He said:

   I didn’t chose first person because I wanted a sort of neutrality in the tone. A first person voice always has flavour, no matter what you try and do with it.  With a third person narrative, you can lead the reader places without the reader noticing.[4]

            A first person narrative might seem indelicate to Eilis, cause the same kind of affront that she herself feels when her landlady Mrs Kehoe over-shares information: ‘She believed that Mrs Kehoe was giving her too much without knowing her well enough and just now had also said too much’ (Bk, p.99).  The ‘flavour’ that Toibin talks about above locks narrative into character, doesn’t allow for the gap that enables us to see through the character’s eyes as well as beyond them, discussed earlier.  It is not only the reader who is led places ‘without noticing’ in close third person point of view, but also character, as we saw with Eilis as she is shepherded onto a liner bound for Brooklyn.

            In this blogs I wanted to look in detail at the range of ways in which narrative point of view can work to ‘catch’ character. I've learnt a lot from it that is going to help in developing my own practice as a writer.

Steinbeck showed how the use of an omniscient narrator can personify the world of the novel, provide sweeping panoramas that make a character of landscape, while Morrison shows how narrative voice can be a battleground for characters: who gets to speak, about what and when? This theme of control is key to our understanding of Sethe’s character and integral to Morrison’s study of slavery’s gruesome manifestations.  Raisin’s novel demonstrated how a few carefully selected words can characterise a voice that is close to that of the protagonist and yet distant enough to accommodate context and enable reflection on the lead’s condition; while in Brooklyn, we saw how narrative point of view mimics and characterises Eilis’s own life experience. 

Narrative point of view doesn't only work in the service of character.  It is also critical to the overall plot, tone and style of a book, and much more besides. Point of view truly brings fiction alive as it interlaces with dialogue and with action, as it builds and riffs on theme and shapes the overall pattern of a novel.  At the same time I think I've learnt however that narrative point of view that is closely orchestrated around character, and the themes they embody, has a subtle complexity and real depth that puts the ‘literary’ into fiction and which needs a careful, certain hand to pull off.

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[1] Ross Raisin Waterline (London: Penguin, 2011) – this edition subsequently referenced as W.

[2] James Wood How Fiction Works (London: Vintage, 2008) pp.10, 8, 9, 11.

[3] Colm Toibin Brooklyn London: Penguin, 2010 reprint) – this edition subsequently referred to as Bk. Interestingly, Wood hones in on Henry James as a ‘genius’ of free indirect style – Toibin’s earlier novel, The Master (2004) was a study of Henry James, an author on whom Toibin has also written widely in his non-fiction. See, for example, All A Novelist Needs: Colm Toibin on Henry James (New York: John Hopkins University Press, 2010).

[4] Personal correspondence with Colm Toibin (4^th January, 2012).

'Catch Me If You Can' - Point of View as Character II

Creating the sun and moon ...

Following on from last week's post on point of view and how it works as a tool of characterisation, it seems to me that as a direct line into (and out from) the mind of the voice speaking in the text, it's pretty clear how first person narration articulates our sense of character as readers. So here, I want to look at how third person narratives do this - how do we get up close to the lead when the voice telling us their story isn't their own? How - and why - do novelists use, say, an omniscient point of view: the all seeing, all knowing, God-like eye, to get us involved in the lives of their characters? 

John Steinbeck’s iconic novel of the Great Depression, Grapes of Wrath (1939) uses an omniscient narrator to track the lives of the Joad family as they move from Oklahoma through the Dust Bowl to California in search of work.[1]  The novel opens with a panoramic, scene-setting chapter which focuses entirely on the landscape and ‘the roads where the teams moved, where the wheels milled the ground and the hooves of the horses beat the ground, the dirt crust broke and the dust formed. Every moving thing lifted the dust into the air’ (GW, pp.1-2). There are no individual human characters in that first chapter, although the language used to describe the landscape personifies the world of the novel, where the sun shines ‘fiercely,’ the rain clouds ‘hurry on’ to another county, the wind ‘digs’ around the corn and the weeds ‘edge back towards their roots’ (GW, pp.1-3).  Steinbeck’s narrator sweeps like the wind past archetypes that are simply called ‘the men’ and ‘the women.’ The effect of this narrative point of view on character (such as it is at this stage in the novel) is twofold –the landscape itself is characterised as a living, all-powerful, mighty thing which will be as central to the story as any of the Joads; and the inhabitants of that landscape are confined to their homes and yards by the dust storms, cowed by the conditions created by poverty, greed and drought.  Right from the very start of the novel, Steinbeck orchestrates his themes of power/powerlessness, fellowship, resilience, and so on, through what is seen and how it is seen - that is, through narrative point of view.

Chapter Two introduces Tom Joad, the lead protagonist, who we meet on the roadside returning home after his release from jail. This alternation between close-ups of character in action and generalised, panoramic sweeps over the broader social and natural contexts of the novel sets up the pattern of Grapes of Wrath.  Very direct, physical narrative descriptions and dialogue create character.  The boldness of Tom Joad is clear from the start as he walks from the roadside to a ‘huge red truck,’ sees that there is a sticker warning ‘No Riders’ in the windshield, and yet goes ahead and sits down on the running-board of the vehicle (GW, p.5). His clothes are ‘cheap and new,’ his ‘coat was too big, the trousers too short, for he was a tall man’:

His cheekbones were high and wide, and strong deep lines cut down his cheeks, in curves behind his mouth.  His upper lip was long, and since his teeth protruded, the lips stretched to cover them, for this man kept his lips closed.  His hands were hard, with broad fingers and nails as thick and ridged as little clam shells. The space between thumb and forefinger and the hams of his hands were shiny with callus. (GW, p.6)

And so it goes on. The narrative voice provides no insight into Tom Joad’s thoughts or feelings, but instead we are given clues to his character through these physical descriptions. Why is he wearing new clothes?  Clearly, he has not chosen these garments for himself, but rather has been given them or has been forced to wear them (we do not yet know that he has been released from prison). His face and body is weathered, the signs of hard physical work scoured into his features; and he keeps his ‘lips closed.’ Tom Joad is not a man given to unnecessary speeches.  We read these clues to try to understand Tom Joad in the same way as the truck driver, who later agrees to give him a ride, does.  Throughout the chapter, point of view remains exterior to Tom Joad who, defensively, never allows the reader in. On the single occasion when the perspective moves inside character, it is to that of the truck driver and at the prompt of Tom Joad’s dialogue, which subtly reveals his control of the situation:

The driver looked quickly back at the restaurant for a second. ‘Didn’t you see the No Riders sticker on the win’shield?’

‘Sure – I seen it.  But sometimes a guy’ll be a good guy even if some rich bastard makes him carry a sticker.’

The driver, getting slowly into the truck, considered the parts of this answer.  If he refused now, not only was he not a good guy, but he was forced to carry a sticker, was not allowed to have company.  If he took in the hitch-hiker he was automatically a good guy and also he was not one whom any rich bastard could kick around. He knew he was being trapped, but he couldn’t see a way out. (GW, p.8)

Here, then, we can see how Steinbeck uses an omniscient point of view to create character – primarily through the ‘direct methods’ of action, dialogue and description, with occasional and brief digressions into reported thought. Given the narrator’s omniscience, those digressions veer in and out of a range of characters’ thoughts and are not restricted to a particular individual, as it is in close third person point of view. In later chapters of the novel, Steinbeck makes forays into the (often highly poetic) first person monologues of unnamed characters, as in the car salesman of Chapter 7 who says, ‘watch the woman’s face. If the woman likes it, we can screw the old man,’ (GW, p.69). Why does Steinbeck do this? The gathering voices of the novel underscore the sense of a vast crowd of migrants heading west; they provide atmosphere, texture and cadence that modulates the epic journey of Grapes of Wrath. These shifts in perspective also work to underscore the characterisation of the Joad family by strengthening the sense of their dispossession, the fragility of their hope, their smallness in the vast cacophony of the Dust Bowl.

The novelist Toni Morrison often uses omniscient narrators in her fiction. Perhaps because she is dealing with a defining moment of American history - like Grapes of Wrath - her novel Beloved (1987) is narrated from an all-seeing, omniscient – ‘historical consciousness’ - point of view, or so it seems.[2] Like the ghost-child of the novel’s title, the narrator moves in and out of the consciousness of the three lead characters, Sethe, Paul D and Denver; it moves freely in time and space, can tell us what happened elsewhere, in another time; it can judge and reflect and expose. The choice of omniscient narrator might be read as a political one for Morrison: such narrative consciousness gives voice and agency to the disempowered slave infant murdered by her own mother – and confers on Black History the same authority assumed by white, mainstream history (a construct that will be disrupted).  It is a voice full of beauty and rage, power and tenderness, cruelty and horror: an embodiment – a characterisation - of Slave(ry) itself.

Morrison has said of her characters:

I take control of them. They are very carefully imagined.  I feel as though I know all there is to know about them, even things I don’t write – like how they part their hair. They are like ghosts. They have nothing on their minds but themselves and aren’t interested in anything but themselves.[3]

            Point of view and characterisation in Beloved are skilfully controlled. From the opening, ‘124 was spiteful. Full of baby’s venom’ (Bd, p.3), the omniscient, authoritative voice characterises the women at Bluestone Road as matter-of-fact, robust – and haunted:

Together they waged a perfunctory battle against the outrageous behaviour of that place; against turned-over slop jars, smacks on the behind, and gusts of sour air.  For they understood the source of the outrage as well as they knew the source of light. (Bd, p.4)

Point of view moves almost seamlessly in and out of the minds of different characters, on one page revealing how Baby Suggs wondered it had taken ‘her grandsons so long’ to flee the house, on the next that Sethe had felt the ‘welcoming cool of unchiselled headstones’ as she allowed the stonemason to rape her in return for carving ‘Beloved’ on her daughter’s grave (pp.3-4). In a few short phrases, we are introduced to the wicked, contemptible loads that have been borne by these characters and the very brevity and lightness of touch with which these experiences are described has the effect of suggesting profound stoicism.

There are moments in Beloved where characters wrest control of the narrative from the omniscient voice. This takes place in Part Two of the novel when the extreme, protective jealousy and love between Sethe, Beloved and Denver reaches its height and ‘the women inside were free at last to be what they liked, see whatever they saw and say whatever was on their minds’ (Bd, p.199). The women are given their own (first person) voices with which to speak.

There are also moments when the omniscient narrator takes over or pulls back from a close study of the action at 124 Bluestone Road from the viewpoint of the characters inside.  Crucially this occurs when Sethe is in the midst of infanticide and we see her through the eyes of the ‘four horsemen,’ the men from Sweet Home who have come to recapture their escaped slaves:

Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels of the other. She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time, when out of nowhere – in the ticking time the men spent staring at what there was to stare at – the old nigger boy, still mewing, ran through the door behind them and snatched the baby from the arch of its mother’s swing. (Bd, p.149)

Point of view ensures that we see Sethe here as the white slave owner characterises and judges her - simian, unnamed, voiceless, savage.

Morrison uses narrative perspective in Beloved to orchestrate a 360° view of her characters, to understand the many forces acting upon and influencing an individual’s choices, be that Sethe’s decision to kill her own child or Paul D’s to return to Sethe at the end of the novel and ‘put his story next to hers’ (Bd, p.273).  Like Steinbeck, she flexes and breaks through the omniscient voice at carefully chosen moments, not only for the purposes of what Steinbeck called ‘counterpoint, rest, contrast in pace and color,’ but to deepen our understanding of, and empathy for, character, and to extend the exploration of the experience of enslavement. [4]

In the next post I want to move in closer and look at the nuts and bolts of how an intimate third person consciousness works and will do this with reference to two contemporary British novels.

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[1] John Steinbeck Grapes of Wrath (1939; London: Heinemann, 1990 reprint) – this edition subsequently referenced as GW.

[2] Toni Morrison Beloved (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987) – this edition subsequently referenced as Bd.

[3] Toni Morrison ‘The Art of Fiction’ Paris Review Interviews II (London: Canon Gate, 1997), p.376.

[4]  John Steinbeck interview ‘The Art of Fiction No. 45’ (1969) Paris Review - available http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3810/the-art-of-fiction-no-45-john-steinbeck

Hinterland - Review

I was looking forward to this book - so felt disappointed at it's over-written early pages and feared here would be one more fetishisation-of-suffering through aesthetics book.  But no, it soon settles down to tell the story of two brothers travelling overland from Kabul to London and it does this very well, detailing the many obstacles that they find in their way, the small victories, the small mercies. It is, as Barbara Trapido commands us on the cover, 'a story everyone should read.'

There are times in the narrative, however, when you feel very distant from the characters - as if they are acting out their lives underwater - and I think this is a danger of any such book: Western journalist ventriloquises the experience of small-town Afghan boys.  I ended up feeling very uneasy about this.  As a reader and as an activist on human rights, I want this book to be read and for the story to get the attention it deserves.  As a writer, however, I struggled to take seriously the close third person point of view, the slide into first person at the close of the book: whose stories are these, whose voice is speaking, where does the power lie?

'Catch me if you can' - Point of View as Characterisation in Fiction I

Virginia Woolf once famously wrote that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed.’[1] Her deliberately provocative - yet apparently glib - remark grounded the shifts in ‘human relations’ reflected in fiction in the historical realities of the early twentieth-century and contextualised ‘what novelists mean when they talk about character.’[2] Woolf’s essay is an extended discussion of the treatment of character and ‘reality’ in novels of the preceding two centuries, as well as an appeal for a renewed focus on character (rather than on what she calls the ‘fabric of things’).  What interests me is that Woolf argues the form of the novel has specifically evolved to ‘express character’ and how methods and techniques, such as narrative point of view, are used in the service of that expression.

Through my own developing practice as a writer, I have begun to explore how character ‘works’ in fiction.  What narrative techniques can be called upon to develop and orchestrate, or ‘catch,’ character? Which devices best serve the writer who wishes to make character the central focus of their fictions – as opposed to, say, ideas, arguments or beliefs?  

As writers, we might choose to present character through how they look, what they wear, how they sound and talk, why, when and to whom – as well as what they choose to say.  Voice, style, detail also contribute to the portrayal of character. Characters are revealed in action, are capable of making action happen as well as responding to it. Indeed, the action of most novels is driven by character in conflict – be that conflict between characters or between a lead character and the various obstacles in the way of achieving their goals and desires.[3]

Fiction also has the unique ability to tell us about character through the representation of their thoughts and reflections. We can enter a character’s mind and share in the train of thought that might lead them to this or that action, to speak in such and such a way, to have this or that epiphany. Aristotle wrote that thought is the process by which character determines the action needed to achieve their ultimate goal.[4] In fiction, such thought can be presented in a number of ways – directly, indirectly, through summary – and the degree to which that thought is revealed is determined through narrative point of view.

‘Perspective,’ from the Latin for ‘to look through’ first meant an optical glass or telescope in English.[5] The narrative perspective is this lens or eye – and, by extension, the mind behind the eye – through which a story is told.  As Paul Magrs puts it:

Every piece of writing comes from a particular point of view. Choices have to be made as to who is writing and from where. One of the things to be clear about, from the very start, is that you are adopting a specific and consistent point of view and that you are doing it for a reason … Who is telling us this story? … What can they see? What can they know?[6]

In first-person narratives – those written using the personal pronoun ‘I’ –  point of view is allied to that of the narrator, who is also a character.  Reliable or unreliable, at the heart of the action or in the margins, we can only see or know what they see or know: the world of the story is contained within their perspective.  Similarly, in (rarely used) second-person narratives, point of view is restricted to the narrator who addresses ‘you,’ the reader-as-character.

Third person narratives, however, can be more or less distant from the point of view of a particular character in the story, or even entirely outside of character. The classic typology of third person point of view goes something like this:

Omniscient	Narrator is ‘God-like’ in their panoramic view of the fictional world. They can move in and out of character(s), interpret characters’ appearance, speech, actions, thoughts; move freely in time and space – tell us what happened elsewhere, in the past or what will happen in the future; provide general judgements, reflections and truths. The omniscient voice is not embodied in any one character.  It is often found in the classic narrative voice of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and other nineteenth-century (social) realists.
Limited Omniscient or Close Third Person	Narrator is more closely bound up in the action of the novel with a more deliberately limited omniscience.  Point of view may be restricted to a single character or group of characters; language and word choice may reflect that of the central character and yet there remains a gap between the narrator and character/action. Jane Austen’s work is an oft-cited example of limited omniscience.  It is also used frequently in contemporary fiction.  James Wood has called this close third-person perspective ‘free indirect style’ – a description to which I’ll return later in these blog posts.[7]
Objective Author	Narrator restricted to recording external facts grounded in sight, touch, taste, sound and smell; similar in point of view to a bystander or witness of events unfolding before them. There are no direct revelations about characters or comments on the action. Hemingway’s short story ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ reports what is said and done by an arguing couple using the objective author’s perspective.[8]

I’m particularly interested in how narrative point of view augments and strengthens our sense of character, how it exposes and choreographs action and thought.  As the above typology suggests, in third-person fictions character is not reducible to narrator – they are not necessarily one and the same thing. And yet, this method of narrating story has the ability to develop character in complex, subtle and sophisticated ways. [9] So how does this work, and what can I learn from it as a writer? It seems to me that understanding this dynamic is critical to my own developing practice. While first person narration builds (and locks us into) character through the use of a direct voice, the sharing of experiences, thoughts and reflections ‘at source,’ third person inevitably does the work of characterisation in different ways. In the next blog post, I'll be focusing particularly on examples of omniscient and limited omniscient point of view as characterisation in a range of examples from fiction to try to grasp how this might work.

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[1] Virginia Woolf ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,’ in Collected Essays.  Ed. Leonard Woolf., Vol. 1 (London: Hogarth, 1966), pp. 319-337.  4 vols. 1966-67. ‘Catch me if you can’ – the phrase used in the title of this essay, is taken from Woolf’s piece.

[2] Ibid.

[3] For an extended discussion on these ‘direct’ methods of characterisation (appearance, action, dialogue, thought), see Janet Burroway & Elizabeth Stuckey-French Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft Seventh Edition (London: Longman, 2007), pp.80-136.

[4] Aristotle Ars Poetica Trans. Penelope Murray, (London: Penguin Classics, 2004).

[5] Northrop Frye et al eds., The Practical Imagination (London: Harper Collins, 1987), p.1412.

[6] Paul Magrs ‘Point of View,’ in Julia Bell & Paul Magrs, Eds., The Creative Writing Coursebook: Forty Authors Share Advice and Exercises for Fiction and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 2001), p.135.

[7] See James Wood How Fiction Works (London: Vintage, 2008).

[8] See Burroway & Stuckey-French, op. cit., p.299 for discussion.

[9] For an extended discussion of the differences between ‘agency’ and point of view, see Steven Cohan & Linda M. Shires Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction (London & New York: Routledge, 1988), pp.83-112.

At the TS Eliot Prize Readings

Back on the blog after an absence that saw me moving house and procrastinating about how I want to use this thing – publish your work on here and it causes problems for publishing in literary mags who want exclusivity, publish anything too seriously analytical or essay-ish and you might as well have submitted it as a feature.  So, current conclusion is to abandon all seriousness and see what happens.

It seemed as if the whole of poetry was at the TS EliotPrize Readings last night in the Royal Festival Hall: a big audience for a big venue.  The poets gathered their courage as they took to the stage, tiny figures dwarfed by the gargantuan backdrop of a screen that, paradoxically, showed their faces in close-up as they read. 

In spite of the diminishing effect of the stage, the personalities of these poets presented themselves.  Of them all, I had only seen Daljit Nagra before, with his deceptively light-hearted take on British Asian life and the end of Empire, so was curious to gawp at the rest.  Bernard O’Donoghue appeared distressingly nervous – so much so that I got distracted by the way he fussed at the pocket on his jacket and evaded the camera with his downturned gaze.  Esther Morgan was calm and assured – and read for too long (I hear she is a favourite). John Burnside was garrulous and funny, Sean O’Brien enormous and bass. David Harsent, I’m sorry to say, was a touch forgettable, though our MC Ian McMillan insisted more than once that he is ‘at the height of his powers.’ I do remember thinking he looked dressed for a wake in his black suit. Carol Ann Duffy swaggered on stage and read beautifully (though my friend asked me if she was deaf, so flat was the tone of her voice at times). I wanted to cheer Leontia Flynn as she came on stage in jeans and a rubbish blouse, her hair pulled back in a pony-tail and wearing no make-up to speak of.  I wanted to kick her when she apologised for her poetry before she even got to reading, but she was lucid and zeitgeisty and measured and good.