I took advantage of my brief holiday last week to revive my reading habit, which had fallen into shameful neglect over the previous two or three weeks.
I polished off Mister Pip (my thanks, once again, to Mr & Mrs 'The Nags', who sent this to me as part of their - late, but most welcome - Christmas package), a short but very impressive novel by the New Zealand writer, Lloyd Jones. I immediately reviewed it over on The Book Book. It deals with the brutal civil war on the South Pacific island of Bougainville in the 1990s and includes many traumatic episodes: the terrorisation of whole villages, the burnings of homes and possessions, the slaughter of domestic animals, the enlisting of child soldiers, and finally rape, murder, and mutilation.
Much as I enjoyed and admired this book, I did also have serious misgivings about it. For one thing, I find myself not entirely comfortable with the presumptuousness involved in a 55-year-old white man seeking to describe the experience of a 14-year-old Melanesian girl in a first person narration. More importantly, I am not at all comfortable with the idea of an outsider who had no direct experience of these events appropriating them for the substance of his novel.
And so, my question for any literary-minded 'lurkers' out there is this: What limits would you set, if any, to the types of character an author can properly seek to inhabit as a narrator? And what guidelines would you follow in dealing with traumatic real-life events in a fictional setting?
I don't have any clear answers myself, but it is a topic that has been troubling me since reading this book.
7 comments:
No limits. Not in art. The sole determinant is if it works.
Cowboy's right. "No limits" is the point BUT to make it engagaging and nevertheless believable.
Have only ever seen it work in short stories, however. Holding one's belief that the author is a fly (for instance) peters out after a bit ...
While I would hold to "no limits" as an admirable principle, I think in practice it just doesn't work. The fly is a useful example. Where the gap between the narrative persona and the author's true self is too great, one is constantly aware of it, uncomfortable with it, however well it's being carried off technically. Suspension of disbelief (or expectation, or prejudice) can never be as complete as we'd like. If the author were anonymous, we could more easily surrender to the identity presented on the page; but where we know he's a middle-aged white guy, we can never really buy the idea that he's a teenaged black girl.
This, however, was really only a subsidiary point. It's not the choice of narrative voice per se, but the fact that this is a fake "holocaust" memoir that disquiets me.
All you are saying is that it doesn't work. Had the author written the same book,a nd published under a pseudonym, with a fake persona of a teenaged black girl, would you have bought into it? If so, then it isn't the writing, so much as your inability. If not, then it is the writing.
But there is nothing impermissible in any way about a person taking on anotehr persona to write, though I agree it makes it tougher. To be honest, I am not a big fan of first person narrative, so who knows...
No, quite right, Cowboy, it is mostly 'me' - but I don't think I'm that unusual in this; and I think this reader sensitivity to the magnitude of the gap between author and narrator ought to discourage authors from being too over-ambitious in their creation of first person narrators.
I think here, with just a few slight wobbles of over-artiness (check out my more detailed review on BookBook), it does work. And yes, if it had been published anonymously, I might have been tricked into thinking that it was the genuine memoir of a 14-year-old girl who had lived through this horror.
It's the sensitivity of the subject matter that disturbs me more than the choice of narrative persona per se. It feels somehow disrespectful or indecent to appropriate such a very personal story, such a very terrible story for the purposes of entertainment.
And there is a further layer of unease about the use of sources (or simply an irritation about the refusal to acknowledge any sources): this feels like it was - or should have been - based on eye-witness accounts; but the author is silent as to how much of it might have been, and does not even describe the research he undertook for the book.
There are those who would say that if the book 'troubles' you then the author has achieved his aim.
Pretentious gits.
Quite so, Mothman.
I don't think the author here was trying to be pretentious - though some of the commenters such a post as this may attract might be! He is, however, vexingly evasive about how much he used other people's 'true stories' in this work.
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