Pat Kavanagh Prize

The Pat Kavanagh prize is awarded each year for 'outstanding students' on the Goldsmiths MA and presented by United Agents. With a reputation for supporting 'great writing,' Pat Kavanagh was famously encouraging of emerging writers and I was flattered and amazed to have been shortlisted for the prize. Last night I read at the awards ceremony and was stunned again to be awarded second place - I did not expect that one bit! I didn't even know they gave a second prize. Such a confidence boost - brilliant brilliant, brilliant!!

Below is a short extract from my portfolio which I read on the night. The novel is set on the Niger Delta in West Africa and follows the fate of a community on the brink of potentially catastrophic change as a foreign company moves in to drill for oil. It is told from two points of view: a young Nigerian man who is dragged into the conflict that erupts over control of resources, and a British aid worker who observes what's going on from the sidelines initially but who slowly, inevitably becomes implicated in some of the betrayals and violent events that take place. Here's Frankie, the aid worker, when she first arrives off the red-eye from London and has her first glimpse of the country. The Africa of her mind is not the Africa that begins to confront her here...

She must have slept.  Startled by the boom of men’s voices demanding documents from the driver and some payment or other, Frankie raised her body up in the car seat with the heels of her hands and blinked until her vision cleared. Faces loomed at her through the glass. The driver looked straight ahead.

There was a group of five, maybe six, men.  A wooden pole attached to a rope and stuck with nails had been thrown into the road. A Policeman stepped forward and bent down to peer through the driver’s window, the loop of a whip strung at his belt.

‘Morning Madame,’ he said, the sour smell of old liquor wafting from his pores, as he made a show of asking for her papers.

Frankie eyed the rifle that hung at his shoulder, thought of the shock in its barrel, of what might be seen through its sights. A thick vein at the centre of his forehead pulsed as he searched for something to say. Everything was in order, she knew that much, so she pressed herself back in the seat and forced a smile.

Two appeared at the window to her left, eyes crawling over the open lip of her bag. One of them was wrapping a piece of cotton around his finger. Winding it very slowly and tightly, around and around. The officer barked at them over the roof of the taxi, his shirt buttons clicking against the glass as he leaned into the window, fist thumping on the metal above. The men shuffled backwards and the Policeman relented, muttering something about a good impression for ‘our foreign visitors.’ He returned her passport and waved them on.

The driver fingered a clutch of grubby notes through the window as they pulled away.

‘These sticker boys!’ he exclaimed. ‘Always 419ing, sitting in the pockets of the Mopol! You know these Mobile Police?’

Frankie shook her head and caught his eye in the rear view mirror. Seeing herself reflected there, she looked more drained than she’d realised. Her skin had been withered by the flight, fuzz haloed the dark shine of her hair. She’d taken Valium to help her rest on the plane, but the anticipation of arrival had her lapsing in and out of wakefulness all night.

‘They call themselves Police. But thief and go - That’s what they do. And they don’t even care.’ He spat that last word from his mouth and into the windscreen.  ‘All this chopping-chopping, stealing small-small money from men who have nothing. They will spoil your tyres and scatter your papers and demand your money in tax that will line their pockets and keep their bellies full.’

Frankie watched a badge spin from the mirror – an oval of red embossed with gold letters: Jesus is the Reason for the Season. Slowly, she sank down into the scratchy velour of the seat with its faint smell of mildew and the driver’s voice seemed to fade. Her eyes drifted to the world outside as it revealed itself in the light of morning.

There was no big red sunrise like she’d seen in the guidebooks. Instead, a feeble sun staggered into the pale morning sky. People were on the move, coursing down the roadside at the edge of town. Kids wearing only their pants carried water in yellow jerry cans. Women sauntered in bright fabrics bearing wide enamel head-pans brimming with pawpaw and dried fish heads. Ragged chains of teenagers scuffed along in their school uniforms – they ­could have been anywhere.

The taxi passed through shanties: chaotic, dirty jumbles of corroded iron roofs and timber poles festooned with loose cables. Not a mud hut to be seen. Goats skittered in the muck and filth and men beat out scrap metal panels in makeshift roadside workshops. She’d not expected to see litter in Africa, but there it was – scraps of packaging, cans and plastic bags – crushed into the ground and banked up against the brick walls.

‘It’s very colourful,’ Frankie said to the driver, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

They arrived at a junction where a nightclub was kicking out and tall palms swayed overhead in a gathering wind. A young woman, dressed in western clothes with a bottle of brandy in hand, stumbled to the roundabout and slumped down in the lap of a weathered statue that had its arms outstretched in welcome. The woman caught her eye and made her flinch.

She shifted her weight, trying to yield some space between the springs that punched through the cushion beneath her. On the verge, there were two half-built petrol stations on either side of the road, lorry loads of sand parked up out front.

‘To build anything, even roads, the land here must first be filled,’ the driver chuckled to himself. ‘We are raising our own Atlantis.’

A yellow digger chugged off down a track that had been cut into the bush, puffing black plumes into a corner of flat white sky. Female construction workers gathered by a line of trucks. Dressed in t-shirts and flip flops, they made ready to carry heavy loads of cement and hard-core and bricks and sand, winding small crowns of cloth in their hands.  The driver pointed beyond the women to a mansion set back from the road, surrounded by perfect lawns and piles of mud. The building was palatial – all marble and columns and broad stone steps. 

The driver asked if she’d be taking one of the new homes herself and seemed disappointed when she said she didn’t think so.

‘Your company – they will prepare this for you. Wait and see.’

‘No. I’ll be not be living here. I’m going to Akassa,’ she said. ‘Do you know it?’

He pulled his chin into his neck. ‘Akassa? That place down on the Delta at the beachside?’

Frankie nodded.

‘I see.  You are an oil worker.’

‘No,’ Frankie held out the flat of her hand to push back that idea. ‘No – I’m an aid worker. I’ve come here to help.’ As soon as the words came out, she wished she hadn’t said them.

The driver let out a long ‘Ohhhh,’ sound.

‘Now that is a backwater,’ he said gravely. ‘A serious one. And there is too much trouble in that place. You’ll find no fortune there, Auntie. No fortune at all.’

 

Anisoptera's Escape

A prose response to Philip Cashian's String Quartet No. 1, this post originally appeared  as part of 'Did I Hear That?,' a creative collaboration with the Royal Philharmonic Society.

ANISOPTERA'S ESCAPE 

The plains are black tonight beyond the edge of town. Sitting on the flat roof of the tower block, Anis watches the last embers of the cloud bars fade and day rolls over the horizon. He unfolds his legs and rises to his haunches, gibbous as the waxing moon.

Anis likes spending his days up here, observing the scything gulls and crows, the aircraft taking off and landing. The glistening of the reservoir. It is the only place where he can feel unsullied peace and joy. He looks over the edge and, sixteen floors down, a man backed against the railings by a streetlamp bends steel wire into insect shapes for children. A cue: Anis gets to his feet, checks the clasps on his dungarees and picks up a battered leather holdall. It is time now for his walk.

First he must negotiate the stairwell, the walkways, the recesses, slipping by unnoticed. He is not good at this - a man of such ungainly bulk is prone to being seen. Before he’s taken three steps down he’s barged to the wall by a young man hurtling to the roof before the fire-door swings to again. Perhaps he hadn't t seen him. Perhaps the young man was rushing up to shout a warning: ‘Anis – look out, he’s on his way!’

Anis waits, presses his back into the wall and breathes in time with the warm air gusting through a vent in the bricks. Steam as a bathroom window creaks ajar. A girl twangs on the floss she’s pulling through her teeth.

He moves on, descending past the flat where the seamstresses work, plucking stray threads from their cloth; past the dancers lined up at their bar. He wishes he could watch and linger to absorb their grace, but he knows that is impossible. Water drips from a concrete beam, skips the neck of a green glass bottle and puddles on the floor.

Out in the street, Anis hurries from the estate, cocooned in his coat and careful to keep close to the buildings. Paving soon gives way to open ground and he can push his shoulders back and lift his face up to the night. The walk is not a long one, but he appreciates each pace of it: the scented drifts of mayflower, the scuttling life among the hedgerows, spits of evening rain upon his brow.

Anis’ preference is for freedom, not enforced seclusion – he has tried so many methods of escape. Once, he crossed the metal bridge above the ring-road, stood among the shattered hub caps and the dirty piles of snow with thumb outstretched. He waited there all day, until the light vanished into the grey of the verge and he could be seen no more. Not a single person stopped, slowed down, or even beeped their horn.

Then there was the time he rowed a boat down the canal. He made the coracle himself, bending willow for the laths of the hull and hazel-wood for the weave. He even learnt to steer the craft in clear, straight lines. But soon he ran aground on a dam of soft drink cans, a traffic cone and matted clumps of straw blown from the park-keeper’s cuttings.

Undeterred, he had no choice but to make a bid for airborne liberty.

Anis reaches the door of the lock-up, takes out his key and rolls up the shuttered entrance, taking in a draught of grit and grease. He puts his holdall on the table and flicks the light-switch on. Overhead, brightly coloured stalactites hang from the curve of the roof. Anis takes down a blue china cup from the dresser and fixes himself some tea before setting to work on the finishing touches to his project. It has been a very long day.

Tomorrow has been chosen for the launch of his escape. Long before the local residents start shovelling cornflakes into their mouths or spreading marmalade on toast, Anis will be gone from here. 

His desire – no, his need – to flee had started with the hissing. Twins in matching sundresses swinging from the railings: they faced outwards, arms locked behind them, heels braced on the low wall. Convex grotesques.

‘Pssssstttt, hisssssssssssssss,’ said one.

‘Here, it’s the adder’s servant!’ said another.

‘Pssssstttt, hisssssssssssssss.’

‘Get him, get him, get him!’ they chanted.  

He cannot recall a single daylight outing since that has not been soured by hisses.

 His favourite part to work on is the cockpit – more properly, the thorax - weaving bright cavities that house the heart and hold the legs and wings together. It is delicate work, but Anis possesses a dexterity and patience that is startling. He has built a loom in the lock-up, strung with a sturdy warp and wefted with fine threads. The silks he has chosen are jewel coloured: emerald, garnet, sapphire, roseate pearl. Dazzling patterns emerge as he works the treadles in the quiet of the night and likes to imagine how life would be if things were different, can almost think about this place as home. Almost.

But then the mothers with their wagging fists and tongues flock back into his mind. They have accused him of poking and snatching the eyes of their daughters, of sewing their mouths and noses shut while they slept. It was even said he’d weigh your soul and sell it on for scrap. He never understood their gibes and leers, why they chose him as the object of their bile. He guessed the twins’ taunts had got so out of hand they’d turned a rumour into fact. And he accepted people looked at him and didn’t feel surprise, with his bulbous, florid nose, his giant’s span. But Anis had no courage to fight back or to ask questions, and let himself be bullied into silence.

It is true that Anis didn’t always know success. There have been many failures in the way of his creations: legs that got up and walked off by themselves, eyes that shrank and failed at the light, wings that folded when they were meant to propel. His attempts to revise the blueprints were protracted, agonised over by the glare of a head-torch. Again and again he ran his diagnostics on the lift and drag, assessed dynamic pressure, accelerated all six degrees of freedom, but always test flights turned to wreckage, time trials stuttered to a halt. He looked to birds in flight for the answers to his problems, queried the fall of sycamore seeds for clues.

Anis almost gave up, but then the fathers began to take their turn, attaching rocks to each end of a rope and flinging it at his ankles as he passed. They dragged him to the ground, then set him free again. Afterwards, they allowed their sons their sport – chasing Anis with hooked poles, made sticky with birdlime. There was nothing he could do but press on with his escape, watch as hatred sunk its roots and flourished all around him, firm as weeds in stones.

‘Pssssstttt, hisssssssssssssss.’

At last, one Tuesday afternoon, Anis found hope circling unaided in the skylight and saw that it was possible: the gold flashes of the wings, the majesty of flight. Success! Even with his heft, he felt the lightness of his designs and flung the shutters wide in celebration.

Then, a pass of grief as he watched them go their own way, darning air above the children on the path, who turned and squealed with glee. Would that they weren’t blind to the humanity of their maker, to his gifts, to his capacity for wonder.

But they were. They are. And he must leave.

Tonight’s no time for sentiment.

He has replicated his best prototype and now readies the new fleet, one last frantic assembly of legs, wings, antennae, bodies, heads. Fixing, adjusting, finishing.

When he is done he surveys the work, grabs up the battered holdall and packs his dragonflies in careful, tissued layers.

Sunrise and Anis sets off for the roof. He can afford to be less cautious in the mornings, deserted and still as the benches and the courtyards are at this time of day. He makes his way back up the stairwell, pushes through the fire-door and sets his bag down gently on the ground.

One by one, Anis plucks the hairs from his own head and lays them out. When he is ready he unclasps the holdall, reaches in and takes out a single dragonfly. He takes a hair, wraps it round, fastens it like a rein, then repeats the action until a thousand Skimmers, Hawkers, Chasers, Darters, Thorntails and Dropwings are harnessed, ready to take flight.

Anis takes a needless run-up to the edge and notices the distance is unusually clear today. Still no sign of any souls below, just the electric thrum of a milk-float on its rounds.

His final checks complete, Anis does not waste a single minute more. Eagerly he flicks the reins, watches his fleet rise and takes one final leap of faith.

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).