Trust No Englishman

An Instance of the Fingerpost. Iain Pears. 1997.

I’ve read quite a few novels this year with unreliable narrators, some of which I’ve loved and some of which I found a bit wanting. I know why it’s a popular device with writers - it allows a writer to show off, to perform narrative sleights of hand in a way that’s relatively simple but difficult to execute well. When you pull it off, little is more impressive. It’s the kind of thing that makes a reader want to re-read.

It’s more difficult to define what makes for a bad unreliable narrator, though you know it when you see it. I think it mainly comes when the writer has failed to grapple with the why of it: why is this narrator deceiving the audience? Why do they want to, or are they even aware that they are doing so? There has to be an answer more substantial than “I, the writer want to deceive the audience to deliver to them the satisfaction of discovery.” Using this technique without a why is like using a word for which you don’t really know the definition, or citing a source you haven’t read. 

Manipulating the audience is fine. All artists do it, and you’ll never catch me saying it’s cheap. But ideally, unless you’re going for a kind of meta-narrative thing (like Percival Everett did in Assumption) your characters should have reasons along with you. People hold things back in all sorts of ways, with all sorts of motives, but most of them think of themselves as honest. If they aren’t, the writer at least should be clear why. The direction of a written work can, and often does, surprise the writer, but writing is stronger when you know why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Where does that put An Instance of the Fingerpost? There are four narrators, who are unreliable in ways both obvious and subtle. The first is a liar; he is obviously swayed by the common wisdom of his time (17th century Europe), but we only find out later how much was deliberately obscured or left out of his account. The second is mad; he seems unstable, a venal and paranoid misogynist even on first reading. The later narrators reveal that his delusions were and continue to be extreme, and that he writes from an asylum. The third narrator is so obviously blinded by his own biases and assumptions that a reader can’t help but question them. That leaves the fourth, who seems honest enough, and reveals answers to earlier questions, but seems like he could be unreliable if only because everyone else was.

It’s interesting to read a book and have very little idea of whether any of what you read was true, or true as presented. You want to read it again when you’ve finished. Francis Bacon is a kind of ghost in the story; quotes from his work serve as epigrams for each section, and his influence on philosophy and science is felt throughout. This is a book about truth, about who defines it and how. It’s about a time when those definitions were shifting; when there was at times life-ending conflict over whether aristocracy, or the church, or scientists, or empirical investigation should determine the facts. The form of this novel illustrates the theme.

This book is a slog; it took me weeks despite being a page-turner. I still recommend it, though.