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.

---

[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).