Babel Clash

Hello, all! So I’m here among other reasons because there’s a shiny new omnibus edition out collecting the first three books of the Temeraire series, called In His Majesty’s Service:

I thought I’d tangent off Patrick’s stint by talking about worldbuilding in historical fiction & fantasy as opposed to thrillers, and specifically about narrative voice, which is one of my personal favorite techniques for setting the stage.

I tend to like a tight third-person point of view in my work — for instance, the first four books of the Temeraire series are all entirely from Laurence’s point of view, and we only see events from his perspective.

For me, keeping that perspective tight goes beyond just limiting events to that character’s view, to also using that same voice to flavor the narrative (as opposed to using a more transparent voice). As an example (taken from the first chapter of His Majesty’s Dragon, so no spoilers here):

In peacetime [aviators] lived in a sort of wild, outrageous libertinage in small enclaves, generally in the most remote and inhospitable places in all Britain, where the dragons could be given at least some freedom. Though the men of the Corps were honored without question for their courage and devotion to duty, the prospect of entering their ranks could not be appealing to any gentleman raised up in respectable society.

Even though this is in the narrative, rather than dialogue or marked as thoughts, this isn’t factual — it’s all from Laurence’s knowledge and interpretation. This isn’t an unreliable narrator in the traditional sense, because Laurence isn’t speaking to the reader and he isn’t lying, but neither is it an objective truth about this universe. And in fact, the reader quickly starts to see the other side as the story progresses.

I find this a useful tool for worldbuilding, especially in a historical universe (such as the Napoleonic era!) because you can convey a lot both about character as well as setting — learning about a universe in this mediated way is a nice technique for avoiding flat exposition, both because it gives the narrative itself more of a personality, and because it naturally makes the exposition come in manageable chunks — you don’t share information with the reader until the point-of-view character is thinking about it, and then you only give them as much as that character naturally would express. I generally find this also flows a lot better than trying to cram exposition into dialogue instead.

It also has some of the same nice quality as an unreliable narrator of keeping the reader closely engaged, because you can’t take everything in the narrative as fact — instead as a reader, you’re gradually puzzling out the world in a way that relies both on what the narrative says and what it tells you about the character, and your interpretation of how that character is likely to be biased or mistaken.

As a writer, you trade that off for the constraint of having to limit yourself to your point-of-view characters’ perspective — but I actually find that constraint useful anyway for keeping a story more visceral and immediate.

I’d love your thoughts on perspective and point of view, and other things you’ve seen writers do to convey the details of the universe in ways that you don’t even notice. Or just general questions about my work or writing are welcome!

(Tomorrow: the shiny new cover of Tongues of Serpents!)

Related posts:

• Tongues of Serpents, and House of Leaves
  First, to fulfill my promise from yesterday — the next volume of the Temeraire series, Tongues of Serpents (set in Australia!), is coming out July 13, and the fabulous cover by Dominic Harman and the excerpt have just gone up on my website: On to Morgan’s question: Can you think...
• Unreliable Narrators
  Have you read the Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes?  His Victorian detective fantasy featured the most eccentric and unreliable narrator that I can recall.  For a reader to solve the mystery before the detective, you would need to identify the narrator telling the story.  The narrator played an active role...
• On Anachronisms
  Yours truly has fallen down on the posting today thanks to some OpenOffice formatting issues with the promised short story, whose resolution was interrupted by out-of-town visitors, but on the other hand, I can now tell you that Mole at 205 Allen Street downtown makes truly fabulous margaritas, fajitas, and...