Commander
Adam Dalgliesh and his team interrogate members of a religious community and
their guests after a universally hated visiting administrator is brutally
murdered in a church. There are two other murders before this one, though it’s
not entirely clear they are actually murders, and one more after. The story
comes to us through a rotating cast of narrators, something I find off-putting,
though it makes for very interesting possibilities in terms of contrasting or
contradictory narration of the same events. We only see this in a few isolated
cases, though. Mostly the device seems to be used here so that one person isn’t
improbably everywhere every time something interesting happens.
I’m
sort of dismissing this, but of course that’s a feature of a first person
narrative. All of the interesting things happen when the narrator is present.
Spreading the narrative point of view over quite a few characters gives the
author a lot of colors to paint with. So for example we know about the creepy
incestuous relationship between a half-brother and half-sister before the
investigators do, which means we’re not shocked when the information comes to
light, which therefore allows us to assess their alibis fairly. It’s an odd and
interesting way to be sure that the facts don’t unfairly bias us as readers.
James uses this device several times. When we know a thing, and how we know
about it, changes the way that we react to it. This is so important!
Further,
there are a couple of scenes that appear more than once, since different
narrators recount the events. We therefore know who is telling the truth, who
is concealing something, and who can’t be trusted at all. Most of the cast of
characters are either police or priests, which adds another layer of skill in
the art of secrecy to the palette. Neither will betray trust, but both are
excellent at recognizing lies and deceit. I like this wrinkle very much. Do we
believe everything that either group says? Do we trust them some of the time,
most of the time, all of the time? Do we know for sure whose belief systems
will override their obligation to the other? Even a nurse at one point refuses
to divulge information because she has promised two people who are now deceased
that she would never tell. Strong guiding belief systems add another layer of
interest to the currents of truth and concealment.
Mysteries
obviously rely heavily on keeping information from the reader. Sometimes all of
the facts are presented but in such a careful way that the reader won’t
understand their significance. That is not the case here. We learn things even
near the end of the novel that are essential to unraveling the mystery. In
other words, we don’t learn anything until the investigators learn it, so
there’s no possible way to figure out the mystery before they do. As I’m
working on writing a mystery of sorts right now, and I’m noticing that
practically everything has some kind of mystery element to it, clearly this
particular aspect of what we know and when we know it needs a lot of attention.
I’ve
been interested in this question forever. With ancient and most medieval
literature, we’re supposed to know what happens going in. It’s not about
finding out who did it. The stories are familiar: it’s the way the story gets
told that we enjoy. The same probably goes for most if not all genre literature
these days. We generally know how things are going to pan out in the end,
whether it’s a romance, a western, speculative fiction, or young adult, but we
enjoy the telling. When the author yanks our genre chain, as with Liar,
we get disoriented and don’t know what to believe. I don’t think anyone walks
into a tragedy or comedy by accident these days. We know going in which one the
work will be. With a detective novel like this one, we know perfectly well Adam
Dalgliesh is going to solve the case. That doesn’t mean I knew who the murderer
was, though. Not at all! The process and the intricacies of unraveling the
secrets are what we’re there to see.
One
reason Liar was so genuinely disorienting was that it wasn’t possible to
know which genre we were in, and therefore where the story would end up. And
our interpretation of the facts depended heavily on our choice of genre. Where
storytelling might have started out with familiarity, something like: “Hey,
tell them about that one time with the megatherium,” a lot of fiction depends
on the twist, the secret, the thing that can be spoiled or ruined if we know
what happens with the megatherium ahead of time. It’s not a spoiler that Adam
Dalgliesh brings the murderer to justice. But if I told someone about to read
the book who the murderer was, that would ruin the experience. I would expect
to be whacked about the head with the book in that case. I would deserve it.
Cudgeling
my brains (not with a book) to remember the last time a work of fiction really
threw me, I can only think of the movie What Dreams May Come. I might
have been fooled because it starred Robin Williams, I suppose. It’s not a
cheerful film, or even just a sad film, but an utterly wrenching story. If I
had known where it was going and what it would be like, I never, ever would
have watched it, gorgeous though it was. Thanks for the trust issues, movie! We
do have to be able to trust our authors and our genres, even if we’re trusting
them to surprise and delight us. Don’t I have Fight Club on my reading
list?
The
most interesting thing I took away from this novel was the conflicting and
contradictory narrators mentioned above. That might be something very interesting
to play with in the future. I have always loved epistolary novels, especially
when all of the sources are different, like in Dracula, where we read
newspaper articles, letters, etc., and piece the story together from those. Considering
how much I love an unreliable narrator, I’m just imagining all the fun I could
have with more than one at a time. This might be the solution to my monster
novel, actually. I’ve been struggling with it forever because it crucially
hinges on what the main character knows and when he knows it. The most
successful version of it that I’ve written was fifty thousand words in
alternating points of view, which allowed me to have a somewhat oblivious main
character who thought he was fooling others, one of my favorite tricks stolen
from Chaucer, as I’ve mentioned before.
It’s not
charming when a grown human fails to realize when a lie is completely
transparent. Isn’t that fascinating, though? What if our narrators were like
that? I’ve been thinking about this lately because I found it several times in Death
in Holy Orders, as our hero would interrogate hopelessly bad liars. Bad
liars are so much fun in fiction! Bad truth-tellers are just as great, though.
A character leaves out crucial information because the investigator only asked
about the movement of people on a specific night. He claims that the police didn’t
ask anything about washing machines. Which is true, but….
Interrogating
bad liars and bad truth-tellers seems like it’s at the heart of the
investigation into how authors use what we know and when we know it to best
effect. “Lie to me,” we say to our authors. “But make it interesting.”
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