I’m starting to think about novel four. That in itself amazes me. I have written and published three novels — my first one, Tangled Roots, about a physics professor; and then my two Cambodian novels, A Clash of Innocents and Out of the Ruins. Clearly, there are some processes which are becoming routine, some things which I do the same each time. It all begins in a flash. That lightening bolt moment of inspiration really does happen and suddenly I know exactly what my theme is and the broad (very broad) outlines of my plot. But then I spend months thinking. My writer friend, Lauri Kubuitsile, calls this pre-writing. Characters are drawn, the intricacies of plot and setting are imagined and re-imagined. The structure is organised. Many decisions are made over these initial months, but for me there is one decision which is not only the most important, but the most difficult.
 
Who is telling the story? The novels that I grew up reading and loving mostly employed the 3rd person omniscient, as if God him/herself had observed it all and then decided to share it with us. But aspects of narration, like everything else, come in and out of fashion and I was taught, in no uncertain terms, that  3rd person omniscient was very old-fashioned and no longer acceptable. So I headed into the land of the 1st person, and wrote my first two novels in the voices of the main characters themselves. That sort of narrator has much to recommend it. You can completely enter the brain of the narrator and see the events of the story unfold with his or her own eyes. That gives you easy access to all sorts of details which then bring the fiction to life. Of course, it also occasionally asks the question of whether the narrator is telling the truth, how reliable is he?
 
Each novel brings a new technical challenge, and Out of the Ruins necessitated a series of changing narrators. Some chapters were told in the 1st person, some in 3rd, and the 3rd person narrators often changed with shifting points of view. At first, that technique frightened me, but once I got the hang of it, that is to say stopped worrying about it and just got on with it, it flew with great ease.
 
Now I am faced with a new novel and a new challenge. Who will tell this next story?
But now that I have written three novels I allow myself to question the dictum of my teacher.  Maybe omniscience is acceptable; maybe I can be more creative with my choice of narrator. I have been reading the 1978 novel The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher J. Koch. Some people may remember the excellent film with Mel Gibson. Without giving too much away, reading this novel is showing me an example of how fictional private lives can be embedded in real-life political events. This is very much akin to what I plan to do in Cambodian novel 3. But Koch has used an unusual narrative technique. The narrator is a secondary character who refers to himself and the unfolding events from time to time in the first person. But he is telling a story in which he is only very peripherally involved and yet he describes details of what is seen, felt and heard that he could not possibly know. In other words, he is omniscient, both 1st person and 3rd person at the same time. It isn’t until the second half of the novel that we are told how he knows what he knows, and that is through the extensive files of one of the main characters that have somehow fallen into his hands. It is a clever technique. But all the time I was reading, I kept asking myself, who is this guy and how does he know all this? How much is he making up and why should I believe him? It didn’t exactly trip me up in my reading but it did make me wonder.
 
I don’t know if I was so aware of the technique only because I am a novelist and attuned to thinking about these things. It is very possible that a “normal” reader wouldn’t have been bothered by it at all. And if that is the case, then hell — this is an even better technique than I originally thought. As I start noodling over who will be telling my next story, I am wondering just how clever a writer can be with her choice of narrator. I’d love to know what you think. When you read fiction, are you aware of the narrator or does he/she just exist as a distant whispered voice? Do techniques that show how narrators know what they know annoy you or do you not even notice them? The “fictive impulse” is a wonderful thing, but how far does it go?