When I visit primary schools to do workshops and talk about being a writer and explain that I don’t actually know Roald Dahl because he’s dead, I ask the kids what superpower they’d most like to have.
For me it has always been having psychic powers, especially the ability to read other people’s minds. My childhood hero was Counsellor Deanna Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation, who used her empathic abilities to both help others and identify potential threats to the ship. I wanted to know what people were really thinking, already understanding that people don’t always mean what they say or say what they mean. I wanted to know how they viewed the world, themselves and, if I’m honest, me – did my friends really like me? Did they think I was cool? Nice? Funny? Smart? Boring?
Writing and reading for me are ways of coming to terms with my lack of psychic ability. If I can’t see inside real people’s heads, at least I can know what fictional characters are thinking. Many of the novels I’ve written have featured multiple points of view – the fancy literary term for this is apparently “polyphony”, borrowed from music – where you can see how different characters perceive themselves, each other and events in their own particular way. We sometimes talk about “unreliable narrators” but I think if you’re writing in first person, there is no such thing as a reliable narrator. We see things not as they are, but as we are, as Anaïs Nin wrote.
I am fascinated, though, by the alternative method of creeping inside different characters’ heads, which is to use an omniscient narrator. It is a tricky thing to do – the more heads we see inside, the less we empathise with individual characters, and it can often reduce an individual struggle to just one more thing going on in a giant human tapestry. We have too much perspective, sometimes. Or the narrative voice ends up being preachy – think Enid Blyton, who regularly labelled characters as “silly” or “foolish”. It works best with a bit of an edge – the sharp wit of Jane Austen, for example.
The book that made me want to write an omniscient narrator should have been The Lonely Bones by Alice Sebold. That is the obvious comparison for my new novel: dead teenage girl watching over her family and friends. It was one of the titles my agent used when pitching it, in the X-meets-Y formula often used as shorthand to convey the feeling of a manuscript. It’s a relatively rare example of how a character in the book, as opposed to a disembodied voice (often presumed to be the author), can be all-knowing. You can do this with characters if there’s some kind of supernatural element or device that allows them to see more than just their own perspective, or (usually less successfully) if they’re looking back on past events and have the testimony of others to fill in the gaps. The Lovely Bones is a gorgeous, clever, heart-breaking book. But the one I was reading, or rather re-reading, when I decided “This book will be narrated by a snarky anorexic ghost!”, was Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief.
The Book Thief is narrated by Death. It is a novel about World War Two, a topic that makes children’s books immediately “worthy” and therefore a topic I am wary of as a reader. But it is also a novel about friendship and love and stories and what it means to be human. “I am haunted by humans,” Death concludes at the end of the novel, a line that never fails to make me tear up. In lesser hands than Zusak’s the device could have been clunky or overly sentimental, but he pitches it just right. Death is not quite human but he – or she – is who we feel for, while also being invested in the different characters they witness over the years.
I didn’t want to write The Book Thief. For a start, it is brilliant and I could never write it and anyway I hate writing about wartime. But I wanted to write something that had an unusual narrator, someone who the reader would relate to and empathise with but also someone with the capacity to see what other people were thinking.
So along came Annabel, who tells us on page one not to call her a guardian angel, even though her mission is to “help” another teenage girl. Annabel’s been dead for three weeks and she’s not impressed with the situation. Nevertheless, as she gets closer to her assignment girl she’s able to see inside her head, and the heads of the different people surrounding her – their kindness, their ambition, their envy. But knowing what other people think doesn’t necessarily make you wiser or happier – Annabel most definitely sees things as she is, rather than as they are.
I am a little more at peace now with not having psychic abilities. I’ll settle for knowing only what my fictional characters know, and then escaping back to reality.
Claire Hennessy is a writer, editor, and creative writing facilitator from Dublin. Nothing Tastes As Good is published by Hot Key Books. The launch is tonight, Thursday May 26th, 6.30pm, Dept 51, Eason’s, O’Connell St , Dublin
