First Person Narrators

Been reading We Need To Talk About Kevin this week* - for those of you who don't know it, it is about a mother coming to terms with her son's mass murder spree. It is written in the format of the mother writing letters to her estranged husband, meaning the mother narrates the whole story from her perspective. And it struck me that there have been quite a few acclaimed books recently that have been written using a narrator. Much to their detriment, in my not so humble opinion.

Of course, there is a definite precedent throughout literature for using first person narrators. Dr Watson narrated the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, probably partly to humanise the methods and character of the extremely idiosyncratic and, at times, almost inhuman Holmes. Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a classic precisely because it uses a first person narrator. The Woman In Black is striking because it takes the format of a pre-Christmas ghost story, and also because it manages to express the sheer terror that the narrator feels when faced with the ghost. But these novels use the narrator to achieve a particular aim and the narrators come across as either sympathetic characters or at least, in the case of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, as interesting.

The problem with the more recent novels is not so much that they have an unreliable narrator, but rather they have an unsympathetic narrator. In We Need To Talk About Kevin, the mother comes across as not only cold and distant to her (admittedly very challenging) off-spring but also as self-pitying, clinging, and desperate for some sort of confirmation that she isn't responsible for the atrocity committed by Kevin. It is difficult to trawl through 400+ pages of attempted self vindication, particularly given the mother comes across as so self-centred.

Another good example is the character of Amir in Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner. Amir narrates to story, and comes out as thoroughly wet throughout. He stands by and does nothing whilst his best friend is bullied and raped, before selling that best friend down the river in order to assuage his own sense of guilt. Finally, when Amir returns to the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, it falls to his young nephew to save his life and, in doing so, the boy's life as well. Throughout the novel Amir comes across as a passive and curiously unsatisfying character. Almost every good or memorable deed Amir commits only comes after extensive persuasion and goading from other characters.

Finally, the narrator in The Lovely Bones, Susie Salmon, is a sympathetic character, but distinctly unmemorable. The only time her narration is truly striking is in the first chapter - somewhat unsurprisingly - when she is raped and murdered. For the rest of the novel she is detached from the characters and events she narrates, and you are left wondering whether the novel would pack more of an emotional punch if Susie Salmon was removed from narrating and instead the author described the feelings and actions of the characters without the narrator's filter.

Of course, there are some more recent novels that do narration very well. Douglas Coupland's Hey Nostradamus! is a good example, although it is worth noting that Coupland's novel uses four different narrators. However it is possible for a writer to express the inner thoughts and emotions of his or her characters without using the device of a first person narrator - whatever other flaws his novels may have, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials triology let you know exactly what the protagonists are thinking and feeling in spite of being written in the third person.

It is worth noting that I am simply expressing a personal opinion, and the three novels criticised above are all highly acclaimed and, in two cases, award-winning**. It may just be a personal preference and perhaps others prefer this first person format to the neutral third person writing style. But I can't help but feel that the books criticised above would have been better if they had been written with a broader, less self serving and less emotional voice.

*Reading that sentence back reminded me of that guy in The Fast Show: "This week I have been mostly eating..."
**If you can count Richard and Judy's Best Read as an award...