Daemon Voices

by Philip Pullman

  I make this point about the present tense to emphasise the contrast between what we often get now, the immediate, the up-close, the hectic of the incessant present tense, and what I might call the classical style of Pearce’s writing, which has a great deal to do with how the narrator does her work. There’s a coolness, a judicious calm about the way the story is told—a tone which more and more now seems itself to be old-fashioned, quite apart from the medical anxieties about measles and the way people speak. I like that classical tone very much, I admire it when I see it, I try to achieve it in my own work; and one of the aspects of that “classical” tone is the voice of the narrator.

  The technical term for the way she tells the story (and I’ll come back to that “she” in a minute) is free indirect style. This means that it’s told from a point of view that takes in both what is happening and a particular character’s thoughts and feelings about it. It seems to many readers a perfectly natural way of writing, but it hasn’t had a very long history in comparison with the length of time people have been telling each other stories. Jane Austen is often put forward as the first consistent user of this point of view in English fiction: we’re told what happens in Emma the book and also what Emma Woodhouse the character thinks about it.

  The viewpoint isn’t entirely limited to Emma’s, though. The narrator can express a different point of view with great clarity. The voice that tells the story tells us more about Emma than she would necessarily like us to know:

  The real evils, indeed, of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself.

  This tart assessment of the young lady changes with the most natural air in the world into a view of Emma’s own thoughts and feelings:

  He had misinterpreted the feelings which had kept her face averted, and her tongue motionless. They were combined only of anger against herself, mortification, and deep concern. She had not been able to speak; and, on reaching the carriage sunk back for a moment overcome—then reproaching herself for having taken no leave, making no acknowledgement, parting in apparent sullenness.

  It’s such a swift and supple method of telling a story that most of us probably don’t notice the way the point of view darts from one spot to another. We see the same process at work in Tom’s Midnight Garden.

  Here’s the voice from outside Tom:

  Yes, you could hear it striking, very distinctly; you could count the strokes. Tom counted them, and smiled condescendingly: the clock was wrong again in its striking—senselessly wrong.

  I don’t think we’d find Tom using the word condescendingly about himself, even if he knew it. The narrator is making a judgement about him. This view from outside knows the world and how it works. On Tom’s family—the Longs:

  The Kitsons were better off than the Longs—there is all the difference, in expense, between having two children and having none at all.

  Very occasionally we find ourselves neither in Tom’s thoughts nor watching him from outside. Half a dozen or so times in the novel, the narrator finds herself needing to tell us something that was going on elsewhere:

  Alan Kitson would have been disappointed if he had seen Mrs. Bartholomew. She was lying tranquilly in bed: her false teeth, in a glass of water by the bedside, grinned unpleasantly in the moonlight, but her indrawn mouth was curved in a smile of easy, sweet-dreaming sleep. She was dreaming of the scenes of her childhood.

  And here’s Tom and Peter’s mother, looking at Peter asleep:

  Once he smiled, and then sighed; and once such a far-away look came into his face that his mother bent over him in an impulse to wake him and recall him to her. She restrained herself, and left him.

  But for most of the time we, the readers, are with Tom—in fact, we’re inside his head. We share so much of his awareness that an interesting little point in this passage, for example, doesn’t snag at our attention in the least:

  His thoughts ran on the garden, as they always did nowadays. He reflected how dangerously near he had been to betraying it, just now.

  Whose nowadays is it? Whose now? A pedant would no doubt say that the sentences should read:

  His thoughts ran on the garden, as they always did at that stage. He reflected how dangerously near he had been to betraying it, just then.

  After all, it’s Tom’s time we’re reading about, not ours; now and nowadays belong to us, in our time, not his. But that’s not quite right either, because is it our time, in the twenty-first century, or the narrator’s time, in 1958? Surely the word nowadays should really be referring to her time, not his, and not ours either.

  But of course we don’t read like that. We’ve drawn so close to Tom in the preceding part of the story that his time has become our time, at least for the time we spend reading the book. We’re with him so closely that we share his thoughts, and his reflections are partly ours, and his now and nowadays are ours too.

  And this is where it gets really interesting, because (as I said about Emma the book) if it’s done well we hardly notice the moments when the point of view shifts from outside Tom to inside Tom, from Tom then to Tom now, from Tom him to Tom us. If we’re not looking for it we don’t notice it at all. The movement is performed so swiftly and lightly that it seems the most natural thing in the world, even though really it’s a complicated psychological manoeuvre.

  But who’s making this manoeuvre?

  Well, Philippa Pearce, of course, says Mr. Common Sense, the Reader Who Will Not Be Fooled. But Mr. Common Sense is deeply fooled if he thinks that. A moment ago I spoke about the narrator, and used a possessive pronoun to speak of the time in which something happened: her time, I said. Mr. Common Sense was perfectly happy with that, because he thought I was referring to the author. But I wasn’t. I was referring to the narrator, and I might just as correctly have said his time. (Why shouldn’t the disembodied voice of the narrator be male?) In fact, I said her because I also had a his in the sentence, meaning Tom’s, and I wanted to distinguish between them. “Her time, not his, and not ours either,” was what I said.

  But isn’t the author the narrator? says Mr. Common Sense, on the verge of being outraged.

  No, is the answer. The narrator is a character invented by the author, just as much as Tom is, and Hatty is, and Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen are, just as much as Mr. Woodhouse and Emma and Mr. Knightley and Miss Bates and every other character in a novel. The narrator is a very unusual character, mind you, only manifest as that disembodied voice. I believe that the narrator is not actually a human character at all, and his or her relationship to time is one of the ways in which his or her uncanny inhumanness is manifest.

  Think what the narrator can do. He or she can flit between one mind and another, as we’ve seen. Human beings can’t do that. He or she can dart backwards and forwards along the stream of time like a kingfisher. As I’ve said before, my favourite example of this kind of narration, the so-called omniscient sort, is the famous chapter in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair about the panic in Brussels during the Battle of Waterloo. The narrator speeds over all the extent of the panorama, focusing now on this detail, now on that, sometimes looking a little ahead to the days after the battle and sometimes looking a little back to the days just before, and then looking both backwards and forwards along a whole length of time.

  And finally in the wonderful last paragraph taking in the panorama of the whole landscape and then focusing closely on two of the main characters, one knowing nothing of the other, the other capable of knowing nothing about anyone any more:

  No more firing was heard at Brussels—the pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and the city; and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.

  This capacity of the narrator to move from here to there with the speed of thought, to see a whole
panorama in one glance and then to fly down like a dragonfly and land with utter precision on the most important detail, to look ahead in time as well as to look behind, is one of the most extraordinary things we human beings have ever invented. We take it for granted, and I think we should applaud it a little more. I don’t know if it makes anyone else rub their eyes in wonder, but it certainly makes me do so; and every time I read a book where the author is so miraculously in control of this ghostly being, the narrator, this voice so like a human’s but so uncanny in its knowledge and so swift and sprite-like in its movement, I feel a delight in possibility and mystery and make-believe.

  (A little side-note: a moment ago I referred to “the so-called omniscient” narration, or narrator. We often hear it referred to as omniscient, but that isn’t a very accurate name for it, because to demonstrate the narrator’s omniscience we would need a text that did literally speak about everything, and that would take longer than the universe has been in existence. We haven’t got time for that. The narrator clearly knows many things, though, and should really be called multiscient—a perfectly respectable word. I was curious to see whether my favourite dictionary had taken note of this, so I opened it: Chambers’ revised edition of 1959, now much battered and mended, a handy size, and full of those little explosions of mischief among the definitions that delight all Chambers devotees. And there it was, in the form of “multiscience: knowledge of many things.” Wondering if the word was still current, I opened my latest Chambers, the 10th edition of 2006, the approximate dimensions of a microwave oven, and found that it had gone. On the way to it, though, I found this definition of mullet, which I recommend to you: “a hairstyle that is short at the front, long at the back, and ridiculous all round.”)

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  I WANT TO LOOK BRIEFLY AT TWO OTHER FORMS OF NARRATION, BOTH familiar in different settings.

  One is the first-person way of telling a story:

  Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

  The opening of Dickens’s David Copperfield. There are many advantages of telling a story like this. It seems natural: the witness to events is telling us about them directly. It’s long-established: Daniel Defoe, sometimes referred to as the founder of the English novel, used it for Robinson Crusoe. It’s still highly popular; one of its most comfortable forms of expression is the thriller, but it is flexible enough to serve the most literary of texts: “For a long time I used to go to bed early…” It still satisfies readers, and more than satisfies: I heard of one American reader, the friend of a friend, a highly educated man, who refuses to read any fiction that is not written in the first person, on the grounds that he doesn’t know where it’s coming from, who’s telling the story—he just can’t trust any voice that isn’t attached to a name.

  There are disadvantages to the first-person method too. I’ve rarely used it myself, because I can’t help asking why should this character who’s telling this story sound so like me? Because he or she inevitably would, no matter how hard I tried. And there’s the matter of plausibility. I have put down unfinished more children’s novels than I could count because they purport to be told by a child or a teenager, and yet their main characteristic is a slick mastery of tone and structure that can only come from a practised adult with an eye on the marketplace. You have to be plausible about what knowledge is available to your narrator too. Conan Doyle solved that problem by making Dr. Watson a bit slower and simpler than Sherlock Holmes, and as much in the dark as the reader is, until Holmes reveals exactly how the unfortunate Miss Stoner met her ghastly death—or whatever.

  Could Tom’s Midnight Garden work as a first-person narrative? Only with a great deal of strain. Tom himself is too young to make a plausible narrator—too young as he is in the book, anyway. You could have a grown-up Tom reflecting on this extraordinary passage from his childhood—that would be plausible enough—but why bother, unless the real theme of that book were his adult life? But that would be a different story. This is the story: the story is the things that are happening to Tom now, not Tom thinking about them later.

  Hatty could possibly do it, but that would mean breaking the story in two—the first part to tell about the strange ghost-like boy who haunts her childhood, and the second to tell of their meeting again after so many years. And that would mean losing the magic of Tom’s encounters with the garden, which we encounter with him in that wonderful slow-developing way, which works as well as it does because of the frustration and unhappiness before it, which we also encounter with him through the free indirect method that Pearce uses. So it would be no good asking Hatty to tell the story either. Furthermore, there are those little glimpses of other people elsewhere that wouldn’t be available either to Tom or to Hatty. The story we have is told the only way—well, no: the best way it could be told.

  * * *

  —

  THE OTHER FORM OF NARRATION I WANT TO CONSIDER IS WHAT WE get in fairy tales. I mean fairy tales of the Grimm variety, not the Andersen.

  Once there was a miller who had a beautiful daughter…

  Once there was a king who had three sons…

  There were once two brothers, one rich and the other poor…

  Once upon a time, in fact. A long time ago, not now. Of literary style in fairy tales there is not a smidgeon, because these are not literary works, they’re oral ones. It doesn’t matter precisely what words the story is told in—there is no authentic text: all we have are transcriptions of oral renderings, sometimes faithful, sometimes bowdlerised, sometimes elaborated, renderings which themselves may differ greatly from one storyteller to another, even when telling the same story. The words don’t matter; what matters is the sequence of events.

  But that matters a great deal. If you read all the Brothers Grimm stories, as I’ve been doing recently, and you happen to be struck by the neatness and power of this one or that one, there’s a good chance that you’ll find, when you look it up, that the Grimms’ source for it was a woman called Dorothea Viehmann. She was a seller of fruit and vegetables, the widow of a tailor, and altogether she contributed thirty-five of their stories, including some of the best, like “Faithful Johannes,” “The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs,” and “The Goose Girl.” She had the unusual power, according to the Brothers Grimm, of not only being able to tell the tale swiftly and vigorously the first time, but also of then being able to go back and retell it slowly, passage by passage, not altering it a bit, so they could write it down accurately. Clearly she had worked the story over in her head many times, getting it just right, cutting out everything redundant, making sure everything necessary was in the right place and given its proper weight.

  And not interposing anything literary. Modern literary fairy tales are almost universally ghastly, in my view, being affected, whimsical, putting on a show, nudging us, winking at us, showing us how clever they are, or how compassionate, or making sure we get the right political message—swanking or ingratiating or hectoring. Away with them! The great folk tales are interested in none of that sort of thing. In the words of the American poet James Merrill, the voice of the folk tale has “a tone licked clean / Over the centuries by mild old tongues, / Grandam to cub, serene, anonymous.”

  Here’s a passage from Grimm in that sort of tone:

  At midnight everyone was asleep except for the nurse, who was sitting beside the cradle in the nursery. She saw the door open and she saw the real queen come in. The queen took the baby out of the cradle, put it to her breast and suckled it. Then she plumped up the pillow, laid the child down again, and covered it up with its little quilt.

 
And she didn’t forget the fawn. She went to the corner where he was lying and stroked his back. Then without a word she left the room.

  In the morning the nurse asked the guards if anyone had come into the palace during the night, and they said, “No, we haven’t seen a soul.” After that the queen came many nights, and never said a word; the nurse always saw her but didn’t dare mention it to anyone.

  (“LITTLE BROTHER AND LITTLE SISTER”)

  I could have opened Grimm almost anywhere and found a passage to quote, but I wanted one with “midnight” in it, to go with David Copperfield and pay tribute to the grandfather clock in Tom’s Midnight Garden.

  Anyway, what that tone says, anonymously and serenely and beyond any doubt, is: “These things happened.” The events are located firmly in the past, once upon a time. The narrating voice knows exactly what they were, and what order they happened in, and how best to make these events clear and unambiguous. (Ambiguity is, or can be, one of the virtues of a literary text: who can be sure exactly what Henry James is saying in some of his passages? Are the apparitions in The Turn of the Screw objectively there or the product of the unfortunate governess’s disordered mind? No one knows; and how much less powerful the story would be if we did.)