The Perils of Multiple Narration
May. 22nd, 2013 12:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselOct 2012
An Instance of the Fingerpost - Iain Pears - Vintage Digital, 2011
* * *
This is an unusual seventeenth century murder mystery that I ought to have liked more than I did. For one thing, it is set in my adopted home town of Oxford (which makes little asides like the inaccuracy of New College's name - it should be the New College of St Mary - and the snootiness of its inhabitants, raise a smile). For another, unlike some other recent examples of the genre, it is extremely well written, with convincing historical characterisation and plausible character development. But somehow it didn’t work for me.
The problem is the manner of its telling. We are introduced to an interesting and intriguing character, Marco da Cola, a Portuguese physician who is visiting Oxford to find a missing factotum who has made off with some family money. There he encounters Dr Grant, an arrogant don, and ends up treating the mother of his housemaid Sarah, a woman with a bad reputation in the town, using new-fangled and untrusted medical techniques based on revolutionary ideas such as Harvey's circulation of the blood. He is a witness when Dr Grant dies of arsenic poisoning and Sarah is accused of his murder. All the evidence points to her guilt - but the other dons of the college and some citizens of the town clearly have their own agendas, which perhaps da Cola's outsider's eyes are too innocent to see.
Somewhat surprisingly, da Cola's narrative wraps up in 150 pages or so and a new narrator takes the stage, who describes the same events from a rather different perspective. This trick is repeated twice more, with the final narrator bringing the story to a conclusion. But the real problem for me is that I didn't find the other viewpoint characters nearly as interesting or likable as da Cola's fascinating combination of innocent abroad and scientific experimenter. I kept wanting the story to return to him and it didn't. The other narrators are colourful characters in their own right, but anyone who has read any historical novels set in Tudor or Stuart times will know what to expect. The prose didn't help. While expertly done, it felt dry and there isn't nearly enough humour. Appropriate to its time and setting, but hard going nonetheless.
These criticisms are more than usually my personal take - objectively, this is an extremely well-written mystery, and the use of multiple narrators rather than a single detective to unpeel the layers of the onion is ingenious. But any book with several viewpoint characters runs the risk that the reader will identify with some and not others, and I suspect that I am not the only one who had this problem.
An Instance of the Fingerpost - Iain Pears - Vintage Digital, 2011
* * *
This is an unusual seventeenth century murder mystery that I ought to have liked more than I did. For one thing, it is set in my adopted home town of Oxford (which makes little asides like the inaccuracy of New College's name - it should be the New College of St Mary - and the snootiness of its inhabitants, raise a smile). For another, unlike some other recent examples of the genre, it is extremely well written, with convincing historical characterisation and plausible character development. But somehow it didn’t work for me.
The problem is the manner of its telling. We are introduced to an interesting and intriguing character, Marco da Cola, a Portuguese physician who is visiting Oxford to find a missing factotum who has made off with some family money. There he encounters Dr Grant, an arrogant don, and ends up treating the mother of his housemaid Sarah, a woman with a bad reputation in the town, using new-fangled and untrusted medical techniques based on revolutionary ideas such as Harvey's circulation of the blood. He is a witness when Dr Grant dies of arsenic poisoning and Sarah is accused of his murder. All the evidence points to her guilt - but the other dons of the college and some citizens of the town clearly have their own agendas, which perhaps da Cola's outsider's eyes are too innocent to see.
Somewhat surprisingly, da Cola's narrative wraps up in 150 pages or so and a new narrator takes the stage, who describes the same events from a rather different perspective. This trick is repeated twice more, with the final narrator bringing the story to a conclusion. But the real problem for me is that I didn't find the other viewpoint characters nearly as interesting or likable as da Cola's fascinating combination of innocent abroad and scientific experimenter. I kept wanting the story to return to him and it didn't. The other narrators are colourful characters in their own right, but anyone who has read any historical novels set in Tudor or Stuart times will know what to expect. The prose didn't help. While expertly done, it felt dry and there isn't nearly enough humour. Appropriate to its time and setting, but hard going nonetheless.
These criticisms are more than usually my personal take - objectively, this is an extremely well-written mystery, and the use of multiple narrators rather than a single detective to unpeel the layers of the onion is ingenious. But any book with several viewpoint characters runs the risk that the reader will identify with some and not others, and I suspect that I am not the only one who had this problem.