Playing with POV, Part 2

Who’s Telling Your Story

Joshua Tree with broken branch in Joshua Tree National Park

Last week, I included some prompts on Joshua trees. This week, the news about these iconic trees looks pretty bad. From the Los Angeles Times:

The [York] fire is the largest to burn through the eastern Mojave in recorded history, surpassing the 71,000-acre Hackberry complex fire of 2005 and searing through a delicate ecosystem already strained by invasive species and the burning of fossil fuels.

“The reality is that Joshua trees are already in a state of decline because of global warming and increasing frequency of drought,” said James Cornett, an ecologist who specializes in the species. “And then on top of that, you throw on a fire like the York fire, and these trees are not likely to recover in our lifetime.”

“In fact, I can say with the utmost certainty that the areas that burn — whether it’s Joshua trees or other plants — will never look the same in the next couple of generations, if not longer,” he said.

Here’s the entire article.

Writing Prompt

Maybe the best prompt for this week is: How do we include climate change in our fiction? How does it change the narrative (and the setting, the tone)? Will it change the genre of your fiction (dystopian, anyone?)

For some positive vibes, check out some good news about groups resisting book banning. Denise Webb publishes a monthly rundown of publishing business news in Writer Unboxed. If you’re living in the US, it’s likely you have read multiple articles on book banning. In this month’s news—which covers everything from AI to publishing layoffs—Webb includes articles about the groups who are fighting back. 

Booksellers in the Forefront of the Fight Against Book Bans in Texas

Industry Groups File Suit to Block Texas Book Rating Law

Fight to Uphold Block Florida’s Stop-Woke Act

(NB: if you don’t subscribe to Writer Unboxed, you may want to give it a try. It has lots of writing advice from various authors and agents.)

POV Related Book Quote Prompt

“I was going to say that my experiment shows the dangers of creation, the difficulty of balancing more than one consciousness simultaneously.” — The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Caesarea

Craft Essay

Narrating an Unreliable Reality

Following is the second half of my essay on books with fluid POVs. I’m looking at how great writers work in an unconventional space. The essay looks at two books: Trust Exercise by Susan Choi and Night of Fire by Colin Thubron. The first half, mostly about Trust Exercise, is here. It would be best to read that first. 

Night of Fire takes place in a single night when an old Victorian mansion burns due to an electrical fire. The lives of the tenants, all unusual and spanning many decades, are both separate and merged. Hobbies, habits, and life events cross; very early, we question whether all the tenants might be one, a thought that ties nicely into the later ruminations on spirituality and the soul as singular. The names of the tenants and the names of their siblings are often the same--Stephen, Steve, Stevie, and Stephanie have siblings named Richard, Ricky, and Dick. The same things and events appear in a variety of contexts--photographs, butterflies, stars, monasteries, world travel, brain surgery, parents who die too young, suicides. Though we learn much about each character, even very personal details, through a third-person narrative, when any of these characters’ stories switches to the first person, we are given the chance to know their hearts’ desires. Their most intimate secrets surface as they seek to remember the moments that redirected their lives.

We first briefly meet the landlord, an insomniac, up on the roof, stargazing with a high-tech telescope. “He was watching only the dead.” (4) He moves back inside to continue his watch over the dead by viewing old film strips. “Each cassette seemed to enclose its own time capsule, where people continued in a bright-lit parallel existence. Yet like the light departed from a dead star, the life they projected was an illusion from years ago.” (6-7)

We then move through the house to find the unbelieving priest; the neurosurgeon; the naturalist and her interest in lepidopterology; the photographer; the schoolboy, who is only a schoolboy in memory, now an old man with a bum knee; and the traveller. 

Faith and doubt are introduced with the priest, a man who “fell into the sin of judging God.” (11) As themes, they will come back in a variety of contexts, in pilgrimages both literal and figurative. When in seminary, Stephen goes on a pilgrimage to Mount Athos with fellow seminarians, visiting a number of monasteries. With monks, he discusses Greek Orthodox views that clash with his Protestantism. His mother has died and he misses her; he longs for a faith that believes there is communion between this world and the next, a tenet held by both the Orthodox and Roman Catholics. 

It is on this pilgrimage that Stephen introduces the first person. “None of us had been in such country before.” (21) The starkness of nature combines with questioning of faith. The failure of the seminarians to help one of their own, who is in crisis on the pilgrimage, results in a suicide.  “We understood no word except an endlessly recurring Kyrie Elesion, ‘O Lord have mercy.’” (23) An earlier sermon, delivered by Stephen's tutor, on the difference between denial (St. Peter) and betrayal (Judas), might excuse Stephen’s behavior. Yet Stephen himself cannot. He contemplates his inability to act. “I wanted to go over to him, but did not. I remained rooted to my pew, fearful of his privacy. Sometimes, in retrospect, I despise myself.” (39) Later he goes to help at a Tanzanian refugee camp for Tutsis (decades before the Rwandan genocide, but the clashes that will result in that genocide are already building). He sees, again, a faith in which the dead involve themselves in the everyday drama of the living. Again, he fails to act to save a loved one at a critical moment of danger. In the first person, he takes responsibility for his inaction, admitting, “And I ran.” (95) 

The neurosurgeon who imagines “the flats [apartments] as the different cells of a dying brain” (99) contemplates life through his craft. “There was no such thing as an easy process. Misguide the knife, and a patient might lose her hearing or his mind.” (104) Memory loss is always a threat when brain surgery is required to save or deeply improve a patient’s life. Two patients’ stories particularly trouble him. One is afraid of having brain surgery to control an increasingly dangerous epilepsy. She had a love affair four years earlier and the memories of her dead lover are the most important of her life. The other is a man who receives visions from God. His surgery will eradicate them. If altering a ‘few pounds of matter’ can fundamentality change personality and memory, where exactly does the consciousness that makes us human reside? “He thought: there are things we cannot afford to dwell on, and the sacrificed past is among them.” (130) The neurosurgeon’s story switches to first person when he decides to make a life of his own. He discusses falling in love, getting married. He proposes. “I never meant to ask her this here, but it doesn’t matter. The stars are coming out . . .” (144) His death in the house fire may be the most poignant in that he is younger than the others and just opening himself to the possibilities of his life.

The naturalist remembers her life before she received a university education. Her love of butterflies was engendered by an older cousin, Arthur, who acts as a substitute father. Stephanie's own father is uninterested in her. “Herself he appraised with remote distaste, something crueller than indifference.” (152) He becomes an alcoholic when his wife dies. Only remembering her mother as chronically ill, Stephanie “sensed that there was a whole imaginative world preoccupying her mother’s head: memories, meditations, perhaps longing, to which Stephanie could have no access.” (153) Her father, too, dies early of cancer. 

Stephanie begins to speak in the first person while on a butterfly expedition gifted to her by her cousin Arthur. The trip takes place after the death of her father, and she is finally free of judgment. She decides to keep a diary of the journey. In it, she describes her opportunity to do what she has always dreamed of doing, observe butterflies in their natural habitat. She details her realization that she loves another woman who is on the trip, a teacher. Through acting on one lifelong desire, she realizes another. “Whatever else happens, I will have understood this--it seems a kind of understanding--this consummation in my flesh, saying that I may be released from my own childhood, and become a woman, even.” (203-4)

The photographer has many failures in love and by the time he becomes a tenant in the mansion, he is drowning in addictions. “Steve dreamed that his memories were being extracted by forceps, one by one, from his surgically opened head, until he saw his own emptied body suspended, as if through a doorway, rotating to gaze back at him.” (207) (The hanged man harkens back to the suicide in the priest’s narrative.) Through photography, Steve attempts to find the essence of his subjects. In one of them, a girlfriend who first intrigues him because she is an actress, we see someone who becomes more self-possessed as she adds the layers of her stage characters onto her own personality. She is particularly powerful when she takes on the role of a lesbian biology teacher (which the naturalist in the Victorian mansion happens to be). “She is both foreseeing and remembering. This, it seems, is the play’s core: a kind of lyrical and necessary disillusion.” (246)

The photographer is the first character to speak in the first person in the middle of a section that begins in the third person. This occurs while he fantasizes about beating a video game, Quest for the Grail. He leaves off the game for a wedding photography assignment. There, he makes up a new name, a new home, lies about his career and creates a completely different past (one that mirrors the youth of the priest). He hopes to impress a young woman he wants to date. Sadly, his heart’s desire to be someone else cannot be attained. When the woman discovers the deception, the relationship ends, and he fails in the first person. “‘All this gawking at faces and landscapes like they were hiding something! Your drivel about essences! No, it’s appearances that obsess you. Just looks.’”(252)  He dies imagining that he has almost cracked Quest for the Grail, while all the equipment used in his career melts. Turning to the first person as someone other than himself is not just a failure to act, but a failure to exist.

The ‘schoolboy’ is an old man looking back at boarding school where he creates a false self--an orphan--because he feels abandoned by his parents, who are thousands of miles away in Cypress. His switch to first person is interesting because, while others turn to the first person as they seek their heart’s desire (both successfully and unsuccessfully), he speaks in the first person as he doubles down on his orphan story, though he doesn’t desire his parents dead. A child whose parents exist thousands of miles away may be an orphan in a real sense, one whose heart’s desire is not the permanent absence of parents, but that he be loved by someone. “Sometimes he believed his own fantasy: yes, his parents were dead. This inspired a sadness in his other friend Wynne, which he guiltily treasured.” (275)

In the traveller, we finally read a narrative of the self as an illusion, a covert theme of the novel up to this point. As a man in his sixties, Steven visits India in an effort to reclaim his early childhood, a time he cannot remember. For part of the trip, his older brother, Ricky, accompanies him and is able to tell his version of events there, which don’t always jibe with old photographs they have brought. Once Ricky departs, Steven visits Buddhist monasteries, where his version of life is upended. “‘When people dream’--it was Tenzin speaking, with his odd, tremulous certainty-- ‘they imagine that all sorts of desires and terrors are real. But then they wake up. The ‘I’ is like that too. It is dreaming illusion.’” (334) Upset at this notion of existence, Stephen insists on asserting himself in the first person, “his own singularity” (334) as all the other characters in the novel have done. 

He continues his venture, visits Hindu shrines: “No god is himself alone. Each one, in a teeming pantheon, is an aspect or a spouse or the divine antithesis of another . . . Vishnu, the preserver, is the benign manifestation of Shiva the destroyer, who himself creates even as he ravages. They are each, in a sense, one another.” (339) Just as the tenants of the Victorian mansion seem to be individual ‘I’ and part of one another, “Perhaps, like the gods, I am many others, or have no profound being.” (340)

Finally, the Ganges, with its cremation pyres and rites, reminds us of the burning mansion in which all of the tenants die, itself a ghastly cremation pyre. What survives death? we are asked to contemplate, and strangely feel a return to the thoughts of the neurosurgeon in the thoughts of the traveller. “He imagined smoke pouring into the absence where his memory should be. He was staring at bare walls. There was no evidence of his journeys. No evidence, in his suffocating mind, of himself, who might be only sights and sensations, and the horizon he had not yet reached.” (348)

In the end, we move back to the landlord and his stargazing, where the question of individual memory, of the presence of ‘I’ and the ribbons of connected experience link competing versions of reality. There’s an epiphany for the reader. Reality, not the narrator, is unreliable. When time is recast and characters take up their own ‘I’ voices, this doesn’t alter an underlying truth: no one controls the story. The accounts of the deaths of the landlord and each of his six tenants revert to third person narration; they are again existing outside themselves, and we think back to the many butterflies throughout the tales with a sense of hope:

“They’re not stupid. They have good memories. There’s even some evidence that butterflies remember what they learnt as caterpillars.”

“I thought they turned to sludge in the chrysalis.”

“It seems that something survives.” (197)

Choi, Susan. Trust Exercise. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019.

Thubron, Colin. Night of Fire: A Novel. New York: Harper, 2017.