Rise of the Omniscient Voice
By Guest | April 10, 2024 |
Please welcome back multi-published author Henriette Lazaridis as our guest today! Henriette is the author of The Clover House (a Boston Globe bestseller), Terra Nova (which the New York Times called “ingenious”), and Last Days in Plaka, which was published just yesterday, on April 9th.
Last Days in Plaka is Henriette’s most personal novel to date. A first generation Greek American and only child of expat parents, Henriette grew up speaking Greek as her first language and listening to her father relay Homer’s Odyssey. It’s no wonder that she has set her latest novel in Greece or that the story centers on issues of identity and nostalgia.
It’s also told via an omniscient narrator “who knows when to invoke the reader and when to extend their reach beyond the scene at hand,” said early reader Jesse Hassinger of the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA.
We’re going to dive a little more deeply than we generally do into the specifics of a book today, to better understand why Henriette chose to write this novel with a narrator’s voice. With that understood, a little more about the plot to orient you:
What do you do when you feel like your time is running out? Or when you’re uncertain that the time you’ve spent on earth so far is even meaningful? Searching for connection to her Greek heritage, Anna has left her parents behind in Astoria, New York to come to Athens, working at a gallery by day and making clandestine graffiti art by night. Irini is an elderly widow, once well-to-do but now dependent on the charity of others. When the local priest brings the two women together, it’s not long before they form a connection. Anna’s friends can’t understand why she spends so much time with the old lady, yet Anna becomes more and more rapt by Irini’s tales of a glamorous past, the mystery surrounding her estranged daughter, her lost wealth and the earthquake damage to her noble home. Together, they join the priest’s tiny congregation to study the Book of Revelations ahead of a pilgrimage to the religious site on the island of Patmos. Desperately seeking to find her purpose, Anna makes a reckless decision that endangers her life, exposes Irini’s web of lies, and forces herself to confront the limits of her ability to forgive.
How did Henriette land on an omniscient voice and why did she know it was right for her novel? Read on. You can also learn more about Henriette and her novels on her website.
When I began writing my third novel, Last Days in Plaka, the voice in which the story announced itself to me was omniscient. Someone–I had no idea who–was telling this story of two women in Athens in the summer of 2018. “This is not her story,” the book began in my head one August night. “She stole it from the young woman who did not know until the end that it was hers.” The novel came into existence right from the start as the tale told by someone who knew it all, who knew the end–and who knew even before I did that the character of the young woman would come to the understanding of a loss at the novel’s conclusion.
I’d never written in omniscient point of view before. Or, rather, I’d never written fiction in omniscient before. In my first career as an academic, I wrote journal papers and conference papers that, when you get right down to it, take an omniscient stance. In my voice as the literary critic/theorist, I didn’t introduce any subjectivity, but made claims about a work of literature as if they came from on high. I deconstructed Victorian and Modernist novels while asserting my own authority as a scholarly absolute.
With fiction, I’ve always adopted a point of view that tends to the very subjectivity I was theorizing about in Joyce and even Dickens. My debut is told through two points of view: first-person present tense, and close-third past tense. My second novel again takes two points of view for its story, and they are both close-third. It has always been interesting to me to play with the authority that I do have as the writer of the novel and the subjectivity that I need to find for the character-centric narrative voice. I’ve always been fascinated by the gap between what the reader knows and what the character knows. Close-third seems to me to be a good way to explore that. In many ways, both my debut and second novel are about that gap and the impossibility of ever closing it.
And then in August of 2020, when the first two sentences of Last Days in Plaka came into my head, they spoke with the authority that belonged not to any of the characters I didn’t even have names for yet, but to the narrator. And that voice felt right. As I dove into the draft, I realized that I wanted this novel to unfold quickly, and that an omniscient narrator can rely on summary more than a close-third narrator can, and that summary was the way to narrative speed. In addition, I wanted to be able to observe cultural and individual customs and opine on them. So my narrator takes the stance of someone probably Greek who might roll their eyes at the foibles of the culture, while also expressing deep tenderness and affection for them.
I wanted the narrator to move back and forth across the timeline of the novel, sometimes laying out information from further along, and sometimes keeping a secret–and making it clear that that secret was being kept. Since the story ended up revolving around the question of discerning fabrications from the truth, my narrator would play with the reader’s awareness–not to the extent that the reader felt manipulated, I hoped, but certainly using secrets and revelations to create suspense and narrative drive.
Omniscient wasn’t easy. There was the pitfall of head-hopping, and the risk that I would adopt a narrative distance so great that the reader couldn’t see the characters as individual people. It was all well and good when my characters were together in the same place. Then, I could watch them all at once, and tell their communal story. But for the narrative to move from the experience of 82-year-old Irini to that of 26-year-old Anna, when they were separate from each other, I had to find effective ways to segue. To avoid head-hopping, I used space as a connector between the two women. For instance, in one moment, Irini is doing something in a part of Athens very near where Anna is. Though neither woman knows this, the narrator comments on that fact. In a way, I move the camera from Irini, up above her, then find Anna in view, and then come down beside her, and in this way, I segue rather than hop.
My favorite example of this technique comes from Dickens, actually, so often thought of as stodgy even though his narrative technique encompassed a great deal of experimentation. In Bleak House, he narrates a scene that has a crow hovering over it, then follows the crow, and then sets the narration down in the new place–with different characters–where the crow has flown. It’s cinematic before there was cinema. Ian McEwan does something similarly cinematic in Atonement when Robbie goes down to the kitchen in the Tallis house to shine his shoes. The narrative voice here is “omniscient” (if you’ve read Atonement you know why I put it in quotation marks), and follows Robbie down to visit his mother, stays with her for a bit, even narrating some backstory about her, and then follows Robbie out of the room. McEwan is a great reminder that omniscient isn’t actually omniscient; it’s omnipotent. It doesn’t have to know everything; it can do everything, or whatever it wants. And sometimes what it wants to do is stay very close to one person and then another.
No conversation about omniscient point of view can be complete without an acknowledgment of all the utterly modern and subjective ways in which writers are using the technique now. Think of sections of Aminatta Forna’s Happiness, or Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series, or Andrew Sean Greer’s Less. Or the queen of innovative omniscience: Kate Atkinson. Take a look at Shrines of Gaiety where the narrator’s phrasing (“in triumph rather than in sorrow”) is picked up by a character in her thoughts! If this isn’t evidence that the omniscient point of view belongs to the contemporary age of post-everything, I don’t know what is.
When I’m asked which character I identify with in Last Days in Plaka, I sometimes hesitate. Is it Irini, as familiar to me as my many octogenarian family members and friends in Greece? Or is it Anna, like me, a first-generation Greek-American who speaks Greek with no accent? Of course, there are elements of me in each of these two women. But it’s the narrator I most closely identify with. For better or for worse, that omniscient narrator is my stand-in, offering up to the reader this Greek world I love so much, with all its faults and wonders.
Have you explored an omniscient point-of-view or imagined it as a part of your own work? What was your experience? Over to you, WU community.
Many thanks to today’s guest.
You can read more WU guest posts by visiting this link.
Henriette, I think in the earliest days of creating a novel, we have one or two characters speaking to us, but we are not certain who really OWNS the story. It can be difficult to decide this, and thus the omniscient voice is a choice. For me, the problem of how my characters developed knowledge of some plot elements and not others, gradually caused me to change point of view chapter to chapter. That allowed the reader to gradually know EVERYTHING that was happening in the story, though some of my characters were still in the dark. This worked well: my main plot, a missing child. The reader gradually knows all, but it takes the length of the novel for my major characters to come to so many more conclusions. Thanks for your post.
That is, indeed, the challenge: to choose a voice and then control it so that you can relay the narrative information, the secrets, in the right moment and through the right character!
Interesting choice – good reasons for making it.
Those of us with a heavy classics background grew up with the omniscient pov, and it ‘feels’ like the thing to do, and, when we make other choices, have to work at it.
Elizabeth wants her readers to know everything – and I specifically want the opposite: they only get, from a close third pov, exactly what I want them to learn from the current pov character. I root out anything that smells of narrator.
So many ways to write! I’ll remember to keep ‘omniscient’ as a possibility.
This is the first time I’ve written in omniscient. It does come down to what you want your readers to know, and how you want them to receive that knowledge!
Henriette, what a fascinating look into your writing omni and just from reading this essay, you have a strong and sure voice. It’s everything and when a story pours out of you in a particular voice, you have to trust it. I love that your opening has remained. A lot of my short stories for little kids use omniscient viewpoint because that’s how they came out. But the stories I write for older kids tend to have a single POV, perhaps because it’s more immersive. I’ve experimented with dual POV but found the switch jarring, even though I know my story people intimately.
“McEwan is a great reminder that omniscient isn’t actually omniscient; it’s omnipotent. It doesn’t have to know everything; it can do everything, or whatever it wants. And sometimes what it wants to do is stay very close to one person and then another.” Such a good reminder. Thank you for a lovely essay and congratulations on the publication of Last Days.
You’re very welcome, Vijaya! And thank you for your nice comment!
I agree that we have to consider “omnipotent,” rather than “omniscient.” Many of my favorite writers, such as Terry Pratchett and Carl Hiaasen, rely on what we might call omniscient third person, or distant third, but it’s neither of those things. These writers change scenes with nothing more than a blank line, and head-hop with abandon. We know what characters are thinking, even though we never hear their thoughts in their own words. But nobody knows what’s going to happen next.
I’ve never read Pratchett, but I agree with you about Hiaasen. He really does head-hop and somehow it’s not bothersome. There’s a sort of antic quality to his work, so maybe that’s why the head-hopping fits. The narrative distance is never so small, either, that he can’t make leaps sideways.
Don read the guest post with high interest. He admired the author’s embrace of a narrative perspective long out of fashion. He particularly liked the how omniscient POV can use summary, the narrator’s freedom to comment, and the use of transitional devices like the crow, a method of connecting time, distance and characters used by others including Virginia Woolf. (See the ribbon in the drawer tying together the two halves of To the Lighthouse.)
The key to omniscient, Don felt, was to grasp that the narrator is reporting everything, including what seems to be “close” and silent going on inside the heads and hearts of characters. With this strategy, there are not multiple POV’s, actually, only one. And that POV has an obligation not only to report, but to use the narrator’s freedom to deepen the story. If the omniscient narrator is a blank, he thought, why bother with the omniscient perspective at all?
Now Don was keen to read Last Days in Planka (published by a favorite “small” press, Pegasus) and to read an omniscient narrator in action. What a great post, he said to himself, wishing that everyone could read what he was feeling.
Henriette:
I’ve been reading from Last Days in Plaka and from one of your earlier works, The Children. The graceful swing from the head of one POV character to another is most impressive! Each character has a distinct, singular voice. I recommend it to anyone who wants to see how a master handles omniscient POV.
Thank you! But I can’t take credit for The Children as I don’t know it and didn’t write it!
Yikes. My bad. The Children was written by another talented writer, Charlotte Wood.
Henriette, thanks for delving into the POV and teaching us all something new about omniscience/omnipotence. So fascinating that the first lines of Last Days were the first to come to you and survived all the way through the editing process. As I struggle to “summarize” rather than “scene-ize” less crucial parts of my WIP, it’s good to know there’s another potential too… at leastl for a future book.
Carol, you inspired me to double-check my facts. The second sentence was slightly different when I first wrote it down, ending with “did not know it was hers at all.” I changed it to “did not know until the end that it was hers” once I had the omniscient voice cemented and I knew this narrator would know the ending at the beginning and would overtly state that fact. I have to say, I really enjoyed being able to summarize through the omniscient voice. It’s a very different mode of storytelling–maybe a more storytelling mode of storytelling!–and I found it a useful tool.
Time for an espionage novel re-read or film re-play methinks. Do read and where possible view on screen these best in class espionage thrillers:
Fiction – Len Deighton – Funeral in Berlin – shame they chose The Ipcress File for a remake rather than this.
Fact based – Bill Fairclough (a distant relation) – Beyond Enkription in The Burlington Files series – an unadulterated noir sui generis novel but read some of the more recent intriguing news first on TheBurlingtonFiles website which is delightfully advert free.
Fiction – Mick Herron – Slow Horses in The Slough House series – an anti-Bond masterpiece laced with sardonic humour.
Fact based – Ben Macintyre – The Spy and The Traitor + A Spy Among Friends – must reads for all espionage cognoscenti and pals of The Times.
Fiction from long ago – Eric Ambler’s produce – little talked of nowadays but he wrote some excellent spy thrillers and had a load more of his novels converted to films than John le Carré had his “oxen turned into bouillon cubes”!
Henriette, I began a reply yesterday and couldn’t finish it because I was in such haste to buy you book and begin reading. I started my own story discovering it in omnipotent ariel views with the narrator diving in close but everyone kept asking me to let them inside my character’s heads and let them experience through my characters eyes. I yielded and am now drafting in close 3rd.
You are the first with ‘Rise of the Omniscient” identify both what it accomplishes and the art and craft of sweeping readers away. And I see it all in your story and better understand what I love about it. I look forward to exploring ‘Omni’ with fresh appreciation and understanding.
Thank you for ‘Last Days in the Plaka.’ I was fortunate one February, full of strikes, few tourists, and people making do with uncertainty, to spend two weeks in a room over a street in the Plaka wandering. You capture the time, places, and people in such a granular way I’m transported in the middle of it all again.
Your Admiration Society is in session.
Torrie, thank you for this nice comment! I’m glad you got to experience Plaka in that way. For all its annoyances (tourists, hawkers, the increased Airbnb-ing of the buildings), it’s a very special part of Athens. And I’m glad this piece has given you some food for thought on omniscience narrative. There’s no right or wrong narrative stance, of course. Each book suggests its own appropriate one. Omniscient just happened to be the right choice for LDIP.
Oh, how I love “I segue rather than hop.” This is an elegant technique that provides clarity and a smooth ride for the reader. I wish more modern writers of omniscient would employ it.