The voices in your head

In our last Grammar Talk post, we looked at the importance of having the right sort of narration in a story. This week, I thought it would be fun to look at some examples of people who did this really well. I've perused my shelves, pulling from a range of genres and styles to assemble a list of favourites.

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series

As I have repeatedly stated in earlier posts, Douglas Adams has a wonderfully unique way with words. His prose is deeply ironic and highly absurdist, constantly taking the reader by surprise. You never quite know what to expect with Adams, and he takes a lot of pleasure in subverting expectations (and reality) and pulling humour out of it.

One of my favourite aspects of Adams' style is his way of describing things through comparisons. Adams never picks an obvious or mundane comparison, reaching instead for something visually vivid and usually logically or semantically incongruous: bricks not hanging in the air, endless David Bowies stacked upon each other, that sort of thing. This plays into the books' broader absurdist tone, which you can also see in the nonsensical plot swerves and subversive syntactical rhetoric.

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

Susanna Clarke: Piranesi

Piranesi is one of the most beautifully written novellas I have ever read. Clarke takes on a musing, poetic voice which perfectly reflects the beautiful and otherworldly setting of the House. The narration is from the perspective of the titular character, who has a unique way of describing and interacting with his (equally unique) environment that feels reverent, almost religious.

Is it disrespectful to the House to love some Statues more than others? I sometimes ask Myself this question. It is my belief that the House itself loves and blesses equally everything that it has created. Should I try to do the same? Yet, at the same time, I can see that it is in the nature of men to prefer one thing to another, to find one thing more meaningful than another.

Terry Pratchett: the Discworld series

The late, great Sir Terry Pratchett is infamous for writing in such a way that he gets you laughing and then, right in the middle of it, slams a killer line into the back of your brain like an iron skillet. BAM. Suddenly, you're looking at life in a whole new way. Pratchett's satirical humour is often disarming and silly, but is also highly perceptive and incisive about the contradictions he observed in the world around him.

There are a great many amazing quotes in this very long series, so I couldn't help but include several of them below. This is only scratching the surface of Pratchett's genius, though, and I encourage you to read through some more to get a better picture of his style.

It is true that words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone’s mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them.
*

And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things.
*

Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.

Martha Wells: The Murderbot Diaries

One of the things that immediately draws people into The Murderbot Diaries is the sardonic voice of the SecUnit narrating them. The titular Murderbot is a hot mess of sarcasm, pessimism, and crushing social anxiety who thinks very little of humans as a group, yet repeatedly finds itself saving their idiotic asses anyway. The prose is simply dripping with irony, whether in relation to the discrepancy between Murderbot's inner monologue and what it tells its clients or regarding Murderbot's own blatant lack of self-awareness.

I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don't know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

Hilary Mantel: the Wolf Hall trilogy

Hilary Mantel is, admittedly, a dense writer. Her historical fiction gets heavy enough to be an effective murder weapon; I own a couple of volumes that are dangerously close to 800 pages long. She is, however, extremely compelling, and has the ability to draw readers in with her lofty prose. In the Wolf Hall trilogy, she delves deeply into the psyche of Thomas Cromwell, a canny political creature who thinks far, far more than he says. Subsequently, the narration of the series is thorough and layered, with complexly structured sentences and consideration of every angle of every thought.

He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities. While he is doing his best to keep the king married to Queen Katherine and her Spanish-Imperial family, by begging Henry to forget his scruples, he will also plan for an alternative world, in which the king’s scruples must be heeded, and the marriage to Katherine is void. Once that nullity is recognized—and the last eighteen years of sin and suffering wiped from the page—he will readjust the balance of Europe, allying England with France, forming a power bloc to oppose the young Emperor Charles, Katherine’s nephew. And all outcomes are likely, all outcomes can be managed, even massaged into desirability: prayer and pressure, pressure and prayer, everything that comes to pass will pass by God’s design, a design reenvisaged and redrawn, with helpful emendations, by the cardinal.

Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep

When it comes to noir, Raymond Chandler is the biggest name in the game, and The Big Sleep is one of his most well known works. It's an epitome of noir, with all the stylistic hallmarks: the biting sarcasm, the bone-dry gallows humour, the snappy cliches. Just about every line is quotable, preferably accompanied by a Bogart-inspired drawl. Philip Marlowe has one of the most charismatic and definitive voices in modern literature, and for very good reason.

I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintace. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights.

Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange

I don't think I can talk about narration without mentioning A Clockwork Orange. It's a very small book—my copy is less than 150 pages—but it is just as intimidating a read as Mantel's work. Burgess wrote the whole book in an invented slang called "nadsat", which is a mashup of cockney, Russian, and a few more archaic and poetic English terms to boot. The effect is very difficult to read at first, but it's also an incredibly immersive way to situate the reader right in the heart of droog culture and the way that the narrator, Alex, thinks.

But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning young earth and the stars and the old Luna up there and your old droog Alex all on his oddy knocky seeking like a mate. And all that cal. A terrible grahzny vonny world, really, O my brothers. And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lipmusic brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that call.

P. G. Wodehouse: the Jeeves books

In his series of books about Bertie Wooster and the inimitable Jeeves, P. G. Wodehouse uses a similar tactic to Burgess in that he writes all the prose in slang from the perspective of posh society chap Bertie. The language of the early 20th century is much easier to parse than nadsat, though, even if our good narrator himself does tend to have a less-than-reliable train of thought. Despite (or perhaps because of) this unreliability, Bertie is dreadfully charming and enthusiastic in the narration, which is a very notable contributing factor to the books' popularity.

I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.

Well, now you've gotten to know a few of my favourite narrators a bit better; whose style of prose do you find the most gripping, or most delightful? What techniques of narration are guaranteed to win you over?