One
of my wife’s friends used to suffer very badly from sleep apnoea. Every night
as she slept, her throat muscles would relax and constrict her airways. She’d
wake up choking dozens of times a night, night after night for years.
Eventually the broken nights and daytime narcolepsy led her to seek medical
advice, and she was prescribed a sleep mask. This was a rather Victorian
looking contraption; a fitted mask covered her nose and mouth, held in place by
straps around the back of her head. A flexible tube led from the mask to a
machine plugged in by her bedside which sent a supply of air up the tube and
into her breathing passages, keeping them open and allowing her to breathe
properly and to sleep. The machine on her bedside table fed air in from the
outside world via a small intake, powered like a weak vacuum cleaner to provide
a steady stream of air for her.
Now,
my wife’s friend had a husband who liked on occasions to go out for a beer. One
night, off he went to the local boozer, arriving home several hours later after
a dozen pints of Scottish cooking-lager and a beef Vindaloo to find his wife
had already retired for the night and was lying in bed asleep, connected to her
machine. Spotting the opportunity for a little tomfoolery, and with all
judgement fled, the husband removed his trousers and underwear, crept round to
his wife’s side of the bed, picked up the machine and, placing the air intake
between his buttocks, performed an act of flatulence that only an industrial
quantity of lager and a highly-spiced curry could possibly engender.
A
few seconds passed, mostly in silence apart from the steady hiss of the
machine, then the wife came awake clawing at the straps that were fastening the
mask in place over her nose and mouth. Gagging and spluttering, her first sight
was her husband’s pink and hairy arse, quivering as he laughed himself silly. In
hindsight it might have been better had he pretended to be asleep, or even
dead. Perhaps he expected his wife to see the funny side, in which case he had
obviously not been married long enough, but it is said that his wife’s voice
could have been heard several counties away.
Which
of course brings me in a convoluted fashion to the subject of this issue, the
use of voice. “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” as Elvis Presley once said.
This is very good advice to writers. Write softly, for you write upon my wall.
Your writing is going into my private head-space, so please don’t insult it
with your overblown adjectives, lumpen dialogue attribution and scattergun
approach to adverbs. Such things are often more a matter of tone and style, so
another piece of good advice to writers is not to confuse voice with either of
these things.
Your
voice will of course be subject to style, tone and genre, as the following
examples illustrate:
“Gosh! Who’s that knocking on my door so
early in the day?” said Fluffy Bunnikins. “Why it’s Mrs Spike the hedgehog! Do
come in, Mrs Spike. Whatever can the matter be?” [Enid Blyton]
“They laws, who’s that knockin at mah
daw at this tahm of the mawning?” muttered Savannah, opening the door of the
antebellum mansion, “Why ah do believe it’s Massa Tom from the plantation.” [Margaret
Mitchell]
Could it be him? She murmured drowsily to
herself as the thunder of the doorknocker pulled her unceremoniously from
another night of foolish dreams. Had Sebastian returned unexpectedly for her,
bravely crossing the tempestuous oceans for her warm, pink hand? [Almost any
form of chicklit]
“Ey oop, that’s bound to be nowt but
trouble at this time o’ t’morning”, grumbled Jedediah Braithwaite as he
stumbled red-faced from his bed, hurling the new servant-girl to the floor as
he did so. “Who t’heck’s that?” [Barbara Taylor Bradford]
I could see the shape of the dame
through the glass, and it was a shape that spelled trouble. I pulled myself out
of the office camp bed, checked my .45 was loaded and poured myself a breakfast
bourbon. I’d been sleeping in my suit again. [Raymond Chandler]
Dawned rimmed the edge of the world
against the serrated butcherpaper mountains and the girl hesitated for a second
before she knocked a second time and the oak door was hard against her fingers
and a secular wind moved the hem of her skirts and the wind scattered the
prairiedust across her polished shoes as she waited. [Cormac
McCarthy]
“Who dares disturb the sleep of Thorson
Bravethigh? Speak now or begone!” [Something with a dragon in it and a really
fit princess with unfeasibly clean Timotei hair and massive tits. Game of Thrones, basically.]
“Whae the fuck’s that? Git tae fuck,
ah’m tellin youse.” The night sweats wis lashin offay me as I staggered tae the
door. It wis wee Kirsty fae the scheme come fae hir skag. “’Mon away in, hen,
get yir kecks aff ‘n’ ah’ll get youse sorted.” [Irvine Welsh]
So
voice is, of course, deeply embedded in concepts of style and genre. But it’s
more than this. Your style, tone and genre will show what you, as an author,
are trying to achieve; the overall ethos of your book, the audience at which
it’s aimed and your work’s commercial viability. But the voice will belong to
the characters and if you’re skilful you’ll use that voice to portray their natures
and their thoughts as well as you can. And of course your characters will say
things that you, as an author, would never choose (or dare) to say. James
Ellroy, for example, sets his dense and paranoid noir fantasies in a Los
Angeles long gone. In the forties and fifties, characters spoke in derogatory
racist terms about black people, Mexicans and Japanese, and women were
objectified to a far greater degree than they are today. Ellroy’s characters’ dialogue
reflects this, but his writing doesn’t. Mark Twain, on the other hand, wrote
during a time when such racist insults were deeply embedded within the national
psyche, and as such his style, as
opposed to his characters’ voices,
contains a whole bunch of epithets we now consider unacceptable. People are
trying to change this, seeking to edit Tom and Huck to cleanse Twain of his
assumed racism to make his books more palatable to today’s younger generation.
Teachers could perhaps instead warn children that Twain’s books contain words
that are no longer considered appropriate or acceptable, but that was how we
thought back then, and could you forgive us because we’ve made things a bit
better now although they ain’t perfect yet? The point being that Twain may have
been a racist (although I rather think he was just using current idioms without
questioning them) but Ellroy is not.
It’s
very difficult to tease voice away from style, but the best way to get voice
across is through dialogue. But dialogue is never true to life. If it was, it
would be full of disjuncture and asides, and the points would be buried in
those little, y’know, tics and affections we use, sort of, and by the way did
you feed the cat? And yeah, it’s like I was saying to Bill from next door you
know, about UKIP, and he says they’ll—oh bugger off, dog, I’ll walk you in a
minute. Anyway, Bill said... Shit I’ve lost it now, what were you saying about,
you know, Thingummy-bob off of Coronation Street…
Somewhere
in there, an author has to portray dialogue that not only makes sense but
appears realistic, even though it’s anything but. And the author must also
portray characters through their voices via dialogue, accentuating differences
in gender, class, intelligence levels and prejudices, whilst often
incorporating regional idiom, modes of speech and accent. Or if you’re Cormac
McCarthy, you could just have your Spanish characters speak in Spanish and
leave your reader to pick up the gist of it (this works brilliantly, by the
way, much better than some patronising mixture of accented Spanglish.) So voice
is probably the most difficult thing to get right. If your novel is set in
historical times, to what extent do you use outmoded speech patterns? Will your
book appear forced and artificial and downright boring if your characters speak
like Victorian textbooks? Will your book appear patronising and cartoon-like if
your cheeky cockney chimney-sweep says: “Gor blimey, guv, that’s a rum ’un and
no mistake!” whilst the ladies of the house say “Please show the gentleman
through to the withdrawing room and tell him I shall be with him directly.” In
short, the voice you use for your characters leaves your book either a tonal
masterpiece or a bunch of ruinous clichés.
Or
what’s worse, just as boring as all get-out. Which brings me knocking on the
door of the self-publishing industry. Without an editor to slap you around the
face every time you commit a cardinal sin, your dialogue and your
characterisation is going to be as much use as a limp dick in a whorehouse.
Your characters will be samey, your settings will be clichéd and your book will
be lifeless. This is where those self-published authors who can actually write
properly still sometimes fall down. They have no idea of voice. And even the
experienced writer will look at a book he’s created and wonder what’s wrong
without quite knowing the answer. There are many published writers who don’t
hit their stride until three or four books in, when they’ve found their
confidence, sold a few thousand copies and made a bit of money. Take Ian
Rankin, the highly respected author of the Rebus series. There’s something
wrong with the first few books, something a little two-dimensional, something
missing, but it’s hard to say exactly what. Then suddenly there’s Let it Bleed and its successor, Black and Blue, where Rebus suddenly snaps
into the third dimension, coming alive with his flaws, his pig-headedness, his
drinking, his broken relationships. Rankin’s writing turns the corner into
something wonderful. James Ellroy was the same. The books before the LA Quartet
are shallow in comparison to his later work. To me, it comes down to voice,
which carries character and makes the difference between some rote A + B = C
plotting and something special.
OK,
nearly finished, but first I need to set you some homework. Go and read two
books: David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten
and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.
These are books that taught me a lesson about voice, tone and style I will
never forget. David Mitchell is very possibly the finest British writer at work
today. His imagination is boundless, and he takes astonishing risks with his
plotting and his storytelling, mixing genres in a Cowboys-and-Aliens kind of
way that somehow always manages to work. What brings Mitchell somewhere close
to genius is his style. It doesn’t matter if he’s writing a thriller set in 70s
California or a futuristic dystopia set in a Korean fast-food restaurant,
there’s something in there that tells you it’s David Mitchell throughout. That
something is called style. And before
you think that Mitchell can’t do voice, go and read Black Swan Green, an entire book told brilliantly in the voice of a
fourteen-year-old boy (that’s not part of your homework assignment, by the way,
it’s just good advice if you want to study voice). OK, that’s what style is.
Now go and read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never
Let Me Go. This is where I made a calamitous mistake once. I hated that
book. I thought it was badly written and unimaginative. I hadn’t read anything
else by Ishiguro, and when I got to a bit that said “His socks peeped over the
tops of his wellingtons” I hurled the book across the room then ran over and
jumped up and down on it yelling “socks do not have eyes, you stupid, stupid
man!” I wrote a scathing review of the book, giving it no stars whatsoever and
then I put that review into print in this very magazine. Then I read The Remains of the Day to see if it
could possibly be as bad, and wound up realising how important voice is in
literary fiction. Because The Remains of
the Day is one of the finest books I’ve ever read. Emotive despite being
told through the eyes of an unfeeling Englishman, sad because that character is
outmoded in the modern world and doesn’t know it, thought-provoking because of
setting, characterisation and sheer storytelling brilliance. And what I
realised was this: in Kazuo Ishiguro’s books there is no Kazuo Ishiguro.
Everything has been subsumed to the voice of the first-person narrator. The
entire world is seen through that character’s eyes, the plotting, the
word-choice, the expressions used, everything is part of the protagonist’s
voice. Ishiguro is well aware that socks can’t peep, but his character isn’t,
so the hackneyed expressions stay in at the expense of style and tone because
they reflect the character, who is
after all the one telling the story, rather than the author, who is the one writing the book.
And
having written such a scathing review simply because I wasn’t intelligent or
perspicacious enough to make a fairly simple deduction, I’m the one who fetched
up looking like a horse’s arse. I hope Kazuo is having a chuckle somewhere at
my expense. Knock yourself out, Ish, I’m a dick sometimes. But there’s the
difference. That’s it in a nutshell, the differences between voice and style summed up in two very good examples of literary fiction
(although I still prefer The Remains of
the Day). Bear these things in mind and be aware that writing is just so
much more than putting words on paper. Some lessons are best driven home with
ridicule, which works better than a shitty stick, and now, if I can find a door
to crawl out under, I’ll bid you adieu until the next time…
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