As noted in my previous post, my friend and one-time (strictly speaking, two-time) colleague, Gav Thorpe, has recently started his own blog. He’s even put gone to the effort of writing an interesting post. The post in question is this one, and what particularly interested me was his discussion of the difficulties of writing a novel about what might loosely be termed ‘fabled’ characters.

In Gav’s case, this means Malekith, the Witch King of the Dark Elves in the mythology of the Warhammer World. Malekith is an invention of not more than about twenty years vintage, but given that the character is portrayed as an ancient figure from the pseudo-mythology of a tabletop wargame, I think it’s fair to say that many of the difficulties that apply to writing a novel about Malekith also apply to novels about Alexander the Great, King Arthur or Robin Hood.

There are a great many such novels; novels which attempt to chronicle the life of some great figure from history, or depict some great episode of our past, or further embellish some ancient legend or other. There are lots of these books, more are being released all the time. They seem to be quite popular. I’ll start off by saying that they’re almost universally cack.

I think this, principally, because they are cack. No, sorry, that’s not what I meant to say. My main objection to them is that for the most part they singularly fail to capture the ethos of their subject, or to tell the story in the manner such tales deserve. They take individuals like Achilles and Alexander the Great, whose names echo down the centuries, and churn out either the kind of melodrama that makes them look like characters in a particularly bad run of Eastenders, or the kind of bloated, completely witless action shite that makes them look like Steven Seagal characters. So many of these books just lack any of the pathos or profundity such stories and such characters simply demand.

This acute failure to produce worthwhile tellings of our oldest stories is, I think, peculiar to novels. I could have put it down to the fact that any fictionalised telling of history is doomed to failure, but I don’t think that’s true. In the modern age, cinema has succeeded admirably many times. Why do novels fail so badly so often to achieve the same? I don’t think it’s that the medium of the novel is inferior or inadequate, I think it’s more a case of how it’s used.

(My) Point of View…

In almost all modern novels (no matter how long ago the events depicted may have occurred) you have the viewpoint character. An equivalent does not exist in cinema. In cinema, we are seeing the film through nobody’s eyes but our own, and we know full well we are looking upon it as if through a window – we are seeing a scene of which we are not a part. This is different to the novel where, to at least some extent, the viewpoint character is the reader. Even if it’s not quite as literal as that, we are in fact relying exclusively on the viewpoint character to inform us and describe for us all that is proceeding in the story. That creates a very unique relationship between the reader and the viewpoint character, and it’s this which makes the use of established characters or historical figures in novels so problematic…

Before I go on, I should clarify that by viewpoint I do not mean point-of-view or perspective in the grammatical sense. Whether written using first-person or third-person perspective, a story has a viewpoint character.

I didn’t think it was a very good idea…

…is first-person.

Arthur didn’t think it was a very good idea…

…is third-person. Both are using Arthur as the viewpoint character. So, not perspective: viewpoint.

Not all novels have a viewpoint character, of course, but the overwhelming majority of those written and published today do (indeed, it’s now often considered ‘wrong’ not to have one). Few writers will undertake a novel without a clearly identified viewpoint character, and assuming this to be the case, the first question is, of course, who is the viewpoint character going to be?

The first option, of course, is using the principle subject themselves as the viewpoint character. When your principle subject is, say, Genghis Khan, this is, frankly, more than a little silly. An author is entitled to enter the minds of characters they have created, and to assume that they know them as well as they know themselves, but to say the same of a figure long-established in history (or, of course, in mythology or other works of fiction) is nonsense.

An actor in a film is able to give their rendition of an established character with a certain degree of impunity due to the simple fact that they are depicting that one character and that one alone, and to an extent sacrificing themselves to do so – not like a novelist, who is at the same time depicting all the other characters in the book as well. An actor in a film pretending to be King Arthur is a necessity of the medium; an author of a novel pretending to be King Arthur is just self-indulgence. Such self-indulgence does not for good writing make.

Novels that use an established character as the viewpoint character are actually relatively few (mercifully). The alternative is, of course, to have a viewpoint character external to the story’s principle subject. There are plenty of works of fiction in which a very well-known central (even titular) character’s story is told by a different viewpoint character: Dracula, for instance. Could you do this with an already established, titular character? Possibly, but I’m dubious.

In something like Dracula, the aim of the story is very different to that found in the kind of tie-in or historical fiction where the story’s central purpose is to chronicle an established character. The story is about who (and what) Dracula actually is. Discovering this through the eyes of another viewpoint character (actually several of them) is therefore perfectly sensible. The reader makes these discoveries along with the viewpoint characters.

The difficulty in doing the same thing with an established character is choosing the viewpoint character through whose eyes the reader will meet the fabled subject of the story itself. At first glance this might seem easy, and there are a number of obvious choices, all of which have probably been used – one of Alexander’s Companions, one of Caesar’s bodyguards, one of Xerxes’ palace eunuchs. Ostensibly, these provide characters sufficiently close to the subject to observe them in detail, but who are themselves sufficiently vague that fictions can be constructed around them. The question is, though, why are these characters in the book at all – other than the fluke of their being witness to some great legend or other, what makes them interesting enough to stand as characters in their own right?

In Dracula, this isn’t a problem – Mina Harker, Jonathan Stoker and Professor Abraham Van Helsing are all characters as significant to the work as Dracula himself, and are his equals in the sense that all were created specifically for it. Saying the same of a fictitious bodyguard invented to narrate Caesar’s tale is frankly ludicrous. He’s a nobody. Such a character just isn’t as important or as interesting in Caesar and it begs the question why the bodyguard’s story is being told at all. Some might try to correct this with a particularly involved and developed story for the viewpoint character himself, but then who is the story really about? Caesar or the bodyguard? A story about a Roman bodyguard is all well and good, but I’m talking specifically here about the kind of novels which set out to depict an established character, such as Caesar. This won’t be achieved in a book about a Roman bodyguard. In essence, a strong viewpoint character is in competition with, not complementary to, the telling of the principle subject’s story.

There is, of course, the option of using various different viewpoint characters throughout the novel (Dracula does this, in fact). This, I’d argue, simply presents the same problems as does using any external viewpoint character, with the same difficulties of each character’s own significance now faced many times over.

A Problem of Omniscience

Viewpoint characters, of the kind typical today, are, by and large, a feature of the limited form of narration. This form of narration is nearly universally preferred today.

Third-person limited, for instance, tells the story using only events and information which could be known to the viewpoint character (hence, it’s ‘limited’). First-person narratives are by their very nature almost exclusively of the limited kind* – they are told using only what is known to the ‘speaker’. Within both these narrative types, viewpoint characters sit well.

There is, however, a much lesser used style of narrative: the omniscient. This is a story told by an all-knowing narrator. It is characterised by the use of phrases such as

Unbeknownst to them all, there was a traitor in their midst…

or

Little did they know their conversation was being recorded…

which, by their very nature, could not feature in stories told from a limited perspective. Omniscient narration makes it almost impossible to identify a specific viewpoint character – who could that character be who knows so much? God is telling us stories? Well, okay, there’s a couple of books based around that idea, but in general, an omniscient narrator is an unidentified storyteller. He is specifically not one of the characters appearing in the book and hence, to all intents and purposes there is no viewpoint character.

Not many books nowadays use the omniscient style of narration, and that’s in large part due to its lack of viewpoint characters. Some people say that the use of viewpoint characters just suits modern tastes more than an all-knowing, nameless storyteller does, and that omniscient narration is prone to pomposity, not at all suited to a cynical age. Personally, I think it’s down to laziness. The use of phrases like:

…he’s lying, Gordon thought to himself…

or

Tony knew there couldn’t really be anything there to worry about…

…which can only appear in the limited style of narration, allow the author to make apparent important knowledge or sentiment which they have failed to subtly intimate or imply in the way that really good writing does.

Whatever the reason, omniscient narration is very rarely used these days. Historically, though, it was by far the most popular form of narration and is evident in everything from Homer’s Iliad to Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. I do not pick these examples at random, of course. These are stories of characters already well-known by the time of their telling. Where faced with the same task – as are any seeking to write a novel about Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar or Robin Hood – we’d do well to take note and tell such stories as Homer and Malory told them: omnisciently. Play God, it’s better than pretending to be King Arthur. Legends about men such as Achilles weren’t written in third-person limited narrative the first time. If they had been, I doubt we’d have thought them worth telling continuously for the 3,000 years since. Why would we think it works telling them that way now? That’s a judgement on the stories of our time, of our day – that they’re best told in less than omniscient form – but it’s wilful arrogance to suggest tales whose nature (if not their fact) long predates us should be told the same way.

Limited Success

There’s a reason I foisted the example of Dracula into this post. It was so I could make it much longer. Suffer.

No, not really. Dracula is an archetypal literary figure as well known as Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar – and his tale has been retold as frequently and as badly as has either of theirs, too. More significantly, though, he is a character that would seem to draw influence from at least one genuine historical figure. No one really knows for certain to what extent Dracula was based upon Vlad Dracul, but it’s certainly fair to say there are obvious similarities, not least the name. Dracula, though, is set more than 400 years after Vlad Dracul’s death and has no actual cast-iron connection to the historical figure. It is, in short, a complete and unabashed fiction, yet one which, it would seem, allowed its author to indulge at least a little of his own historical fascination and to show off at least a little of what he knew.

That is the same motivation which I’ve always suspected drives people to fashion piss-arse retellings of the life of Alexander the Great, or whatever. Their own fascination with some particular aspect of the tale creates in them the feeling that ‘this story must be told’, and so they do. Badly. I’ve already argued that such stories can be improved by a change in the mode of storytelling, but in some cases, people will just really, really want to write in that oh-so-modern third-person limited kind of a way, while also wanting to indulge their own peculiar historical or mythological fascination, whatever it may be. Well, that’s fair enough, but in most cases when examined in detail, that fascination isn’t nearly so encompassing as an entire story or an entire life – it’s a fascination with one particular aspect within. It’s not a fascination with Achilles, say; it’s a fascination with fatal weakness.

Rather than indulging oneself with a complete (and completely unnecessary) retelling of the tale of Achilles in eighteen volumes, surely much better to take that first kernel of interest it and use it as inspiration for something else – something completely apart, something as suited to its author and its influence as it is to its audience. If you really want people to know where you got the idea from, if you really want to show off just how much you know or how cool it is, you can always name the titular character after whoever or whatever it was. With an ‘a’ on the end, of course.

Matt

*As an aside, omniscience can actually be used in first-person.

In my grandfather’s time, a son was born to Philip of Macedon…

for example, though in such cases the narrator’s importance to the story will be somewhat less than is normally the case when using first-person, and it will not seem classically ‘first-person’ (indeed, the reader may even forget that it is, and the perspective may even change – this is no bad thing stylistically).