thoughtfulThe majority of urban fantasy is written in the first person. I fight the monster, I open the door to the creepy crypt at the bottom of the hill, I try not to summon a snake god to Thanksgiving dinner. This creates a feeling of absolute immediacy, while also creating a feeling of safety, since most first person narrators are reasonably guaranteed to survive their stories. (I consider, say, Rose Marshall an exception, since she's already dead. Maybe this explains why she gets shot so much.) It also limits the perspective of the books. When you're reading a Toby book, the only information you'll get is what Toby has to give, and that information will always be filtered through her particularly Toby-esque way of seeing the world.
Third person gives you more leeway on the will she/won't she question where surviving is concerned, and also creates the option to provide the reader with additional information. Sure, the protagonist is bound by their own perceptions, but the author gets to play with omniscience. This is both good and bad, and the varying degrees of third person omniscience is a topic for another day. Suffice to say that sometimes this distancing serves the story very, very well.
I have just finished reading two third person urban fantasies, neither of which will be named here, because I'm looking critically at structure, not trying to compare-and-contrast their plots or the quality of their writing. In the first, the author took advantage of the third person structure and hopped from place to place, now following the villain, now following a secondary character, now returning to the primary protagonist. The omniscience was kept to a minimum, since otherwise, the plot would have turned boring for the reader; this is obviously pretty tricky, but the writer handled it well. I don't think this book could have been written in first person, and the tense never bothered me. It was a third person book because it needed to be.
The second third person urban fantasy stuck to an extremely limited perspective, following the protagonist at the exclusion of all else. At no point, did we get information that she didn't have, which made waiting for her to catch up occasionally a lot more frustrating than I expected it to be. I'm used to being forgiving when my UF/PR protagonists are a little slow, because I'm used to being so deep in their heads that I can see why they're not making the intuitive jumps that I can make. I know how they think. In the absence of that knowledge, I kept waiting for the heroine to be smarter than I was, and I kept being disappointed. It honestly left me wondering why the author didn't stick with the first person perspective that's standard in the genre. It would have been the same story; it would even have been a stronger story, because the immersion in the heroine would have made it much more urgent.
Choosing a story's point of view can be difficult, but I find that usually, I can tell which they need to be by looking at whether the story would even be possible in a tighter perspective. And I try to keep things as tight as possible, for the immediacy. Your mileage may, and probably will, vary.
So how do you feel about perspective? Does first person keep it tight and immersive, or is it off-putting and overly familiar? Does third person make things mysterious and flexible, or is it distancing and remote? Or does it even matter if the story's good?
Thoughts?
(*If the movie starts with people in the water, it's either an evil sharks movie, an evil alligator movie, or a sea monster movie. If you see a shark within the first five minutes, it's not an evil sharks movie. Etc.)
June 21 2011, 16:59:29 UTC 6 years ago
I like a good first-person narrator, and I enjoy writing first-person material. I do think that the modern-paranormal genre is a trifle top-heavy with snarky, wisecracking first-person heroines -- and I clearly haven't been reading enough to have found the third-person books mentioned above. But the first-person POV is enough of a genre convention that I can deal with it so long as the underlying plot logic holds up. At the same time -- and looking back, here, at both Bull and de Lint -- I think third-person narration is, at least sometimes, better positioned to convey the sheer sense of wonder/Otherness that I find compelling in the best urban fantasy. (And I add that the Toby books, for my money, do much better than most other first-person narratives at putting across just that wonder/Otherness.)
It is perhaps ironic that the urban/paranormal series I'm most annoyed with on narrative grounds is, in fact, a first-person series. My problem in the specific case is not strictly with the choice of viewpoint -- it's that the magic system the author postulates (which I found fascinating and original) creates some specific and very tricky challenges with respect to maintaining a first-person POV, and in the course of the first two books it seemed to me that the author failed to either properly exploit or abide by the strict terms of the system she'd established. Which was frustrating as h*ll, because I very much wanted to see the setup pulled off successfully, and it just didn't work for me. Like Our Hostess, I won't name that author or series here; other folks' mileage may vary, and it isn't necessary to name the work to make the particular point.
As an aside, the shift toward first-person narrators is by no means limited to fantasy. Genre mystery, most especially in the "cozy" subcategory, is tilting sharply toward first person narrators in my recent experience. Which is interesting in some respects given the particular plotting issues that arise in structuring mystery novels. Broadly speaking, I think I'm somewhat less tolerant of first person narrators in mystery (or at least of annoying first person narrators, which is a slightly different can of worms).
June 21 2011, 17:39:44 UTC 6 years ago
Some very interesting points!
June 21 2011, 20:54:27 UTC 6 years ago
June 21 2011, 20:57:44 UTC 6 years ago
June 21 2011, 21:19:32 UTC 6 years ago