Another Point of View

Patricia Stoltey recently discussed various points-of-view (you can read the post by clicking here), and today we welcome Susan Wittig Albert to discuss an unusual and little-used narrative POV she employs in her Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter series. Welcome, Susan, on this tour stop for the seventh book in the series, The Tale of Oat Cake Crag, and thank you for sharing your insights with us.

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The Narrator and the Reviewer

In Mystery News a couple of years ago, Diana Vickery wrote a review of The Tale of Hawthorn House that made me smile. “Much of the book’s appeal,” she wrote, “was its twinkly third-person narrator. I could imagine her speaking voice—sweet, breathy but firm—and her personality traits: finely honed sense of both propriety and humor. And when she speaks directly to readers, they sit up and take notice.”

Hey, I thought. This reviewer really got it. Because this is very close to the image I have in my own mind of the narrator of these family-friendly mysteries. (I might add “school-marmish” to the list of descriptives.) And I do hope that readers sit up and take notice.

The Narrator’s Voice

In most modern fiction—and especially in mysteries—the narrator is so far offstage that you’re almost never aware of him/her. The chief exception is the first-person narrator. Examples: China Bayles, in my other series; Kinsey Milhone; Sharon McCone. These narrators are in charge of the story, up close and personal. They say “I” a lot, and nobody minds. First-person narration aside, however, the narrator in most modern fiction is both invisible and neutral. The story seems to tell itself, without any intervention by a story-teller.

The Narrator in The Cottage Tales

But stories haven’t always been told that way. Victorian novels, for instance, were narrated by somebody who had an opinion about something, and wanted to let the reader know about that. And even a few modern authors (John Fowles, for instance, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, one of my all-time favorite novels) adopts the omniscient, outspoken, manipulative narrator as a device to tell the story.

I wanted to tell the stories of The Cottage Tales in that Victorian style, partly because it’s reminiscent of the period in which the Tales are set (1905-1913), and partly because I wanted to involve the readers in the story, which is a good job for a narrator. And also because I wanted to add complexity to the storytelling.

Here’s an example from the first chapter of The Tale of Applebeck Orchard (Book 6, just out in paperback). The characters (the village animals--yes, gentle Reader, these books are full of talking animals) are discussing the central problem of the book. A farmer has closed off Applebeck Footpath, which is the shortest way people could walk from one hamlet to the other. Here’s what the narrator has to say about this:

Now, the closing of a footpath may not seem very important to you and me, since we depend on automobiles to take us here and there. Why, we even drive the two or three blocks to the grocery store! But it was a crisis of great significance to the residents of both Near and Far Sawrey, who mostly walked where they needed to go. To understand why it was so important, you might take a moment to glance at the map at the front of this book. You will see that the path through Applebeck Orchard shortens the distance between the two hamlets by over a half-mile. This is a great improvement in any weather (as I’m sure you’ll agree), but especially when people are loaded with baskets or buckets or schoolbooks and when it is raining or snowing or very warm or very cold. For as long as anyone could remember, the Applebeck Footpath had saved people hundreds of extra steps every day. They would not be happy to find it blocked.

Can you see what I’m trying to do here? The narrator has pulled us out of the story for a moment to remind us that, while closing a path may seem like a trivial thing to us, it’s a terrible thing for everybody in a Victorian village--important enough to get really angry about and maybe even try to get even with that farmer. In this context, the narrator is like another character, a guide to help the reader negotiate an unfamiliar time and place.

Throughout all the books in the series, I use the narrator to present characters and events and comment on them in this chatty, informal way, as if you and she (I do imagine the narrator as a “she”) are sitting together, discussing the story over a cup of tea and a plate of scones.

For example, in The Tale of Hawthorn House, when Beatrix Potter discovers a basket on her doorstep, she thinks someone has left her an eggplant. But the narrator and you, dear Reader, know more than Miss Potter knows: “Now, you have been reading this story,” the narrator says rather archly, “so you know what the basket contains (at least I hope you do!), and who put it there and why.” Readers who have been paying attention suspect that the basket contains a baby, and that it was put there by the character who stole the baby.

I also use the narrator as a stage manager, to move the action from one scene to another. Here’s an example. Jemima Puddle-duck (the star of Beatrix Potter’s children’s book by that name) is a character in Hawthorn House. Jemima is hiding in the barn, sitting on a secret nest of very odd eggs, which are taking an oddly long time to hatch. The narrator finds it necessary to tell us Miss Potter’s tale of Jemima’s near-fatal seduction by the fox, remarking at the end: “Now that you have heard the full story, perhaps you can appreciate Jemima’s desire to redeem her reputation. Perhaps you can understand why she was determined to have another go at motherhood… But it is well past the 28th day, when duck eggs hatch, and Jemima is still sitting. Why? What’s happening here? Whose eggs are these? Where did Jemima get them? What’s going on?”

But the narrator refuses to let us ponder. She wants to direct our attention back to Miss Potter and that mysterious basket on the doorstep. (Remember? The basket with the baby in it?). “But even though you are quite right to raise these questions,” (the narrator says) “and I very much hope they are answered at some point in the future, we must not anticipate. So let us leave our duck sitting patiently on her nest . . . and open another chapter of our story.”

Stage management. Getting the reader from one place to another in the book, creating connections between the various story lines, planting anticipations, refusing to give immediate answers--all interesting tasks that this narrator likes to take on.

I’ve also used the narrator to create what I think of as a kind of Jane Austen sort of tone, especially where the characters are a little too serious and full of themselves and the scene needs to be lightened. Here’s a dramatic scene from Applebeck Orchard, for instance (p. 267, if you have your book handy). Will Heelis has just asked Beatrix Potter to marry him, and she has said no. Oh, dear. Here’s how the narrator tells it.

The polite response, of course, the one we should expect [Will] to offer, is the murmur of some sort of brief, apologetic phrase: “Thank you, my dear Miss Potter, and do please forgive my impetuousness. I fear I am not quite myself this evening. Shall I see you home?”

To which Beatrix might be supposed to reply very politely--something on the order of, “Oh, please do not apologize, Mr. Heelis. It is of no consequence, no consequence at all. We shall not speak of the matter again. And I beg you not to trouble yourself. I can walk home easily from here. Good night.”

But Will has long since left the familiar country of formulaic phrases and conventional actions and has crossed the border into that bewildering no-man’s-land where people behave in the strangest, wildest, most utterly unpredictable things. Perhaps you have found yourself in this sort of situation before, where it is absolutely impossible to know what you are going to say or do until it is actually said or done, and then you are astonished at yourself.

And so is Will. He is amazed to find himself taking Beatrix’s hand, looking directly into her face, and asking a completely irrational question in an entirely rational tone: “My dear Miss Potter, how is that?”

“I beg your pardon,” she says, and is so startled by this unexpected question that she lifts her eyes to his.

“Tell me how you would choose to live your life--if you were free to choose.”

And with this impertinent, insolent, and terribly cheeky request, Will Heelis has opened a whole new chapter in his life, and in Miss Potter’s.

Why is it a new chapter? Because shy, polite Will Heelis for once in his life has refused to take no for an answer, and Miss Potter, for once in her life, is challenged to say something besides, “My parents would not approve.” As I read this passage and consider the narrator’s contribution, I can see that she knows more about the characters than the characters know about themselves. This omniscience allows me (the author, not the narrator) to create a much more complex, multi-layered scene, where accident and intentionality, statement and commentary, are interwoven in a way that reveals a great deal more than if the scene had been connected as a straight-up drama.

Oh, by the way, I am very happy to tell you that, in Book 8 (The Tale of Castle Cottage, the final book in this eight-book series), Miss Potter and Mr. Heelis do get married, just as they did in real life.

This is a long post, and if you’ve managed to read it all the way to the end, I’m delighted. I hope you’re intrigued enough to read several books in the series and discover some of the other ways I’ve used this narrator.

But you doubtless have other things to do and you want to get on with them. So I’ll just remind you that we’re having a drawing and that you need to click on this link and enter your name. We’ll be giving away a copy of the latest book The Tale of Oat Cake Crag. You may also be eligible for the grand prize drawing, which will be held at the end of the Cottage Tales Blog Tour.

Find out more by visiting The Cottage Tales website and Mystery Partners for information about other books by Susan Wittig Albert. You can visit Susan at her Lifescapes blog by clicking here.