point of view
Literary snobbery
Real life has thrown a few curved balls this week so I needed something light and undemanding to help me unwind. 
The Journey by Josephine Cox was lurking at the back of one of my shelves, and it has lived up to expectation: light, untaxing, but sufficiently gripping to hold my interest.
In a nutshell, the story revolves around three strangers thrown together by chance. Ben Morris is intrigued by two women, Lucy Baker and her daughter Mary, who frequently appear at a graveside bearing the inscription:
BARNEY DAVIDSON
1890-1933
A MAN OF COURAGE.
HE MADE THE GREATEST SACRIFICE OF ALL.
What was this ‘greatest sacrifice’? Why was the older woman so wracked with grief two decades later? Who had ordered this inscription? And why?
Ben seizes the opportunity to introduce himself when Lucy slips and falls in the cemetery, and is delighted to be invited to their old Edwardian house. But Ben senses the imperious and forthright Lucy is harbouring a profound secret from her past. She is – but one which she has sworn to carry to her grave. However, her chauffeur and old friend, Adam, took no such oath. He knows the full story and he is sure Barney’s children should all know the truth about their father. Ben’s romantic interest in Mary encourages him to befriend them and together, he and Mary, discover a history of deep and sacrificial love. It’s a moving story even though it’s of its time.
It’s true that when you’re a writer yourself, reading is an altogether different experience. You can’t help but analyse – structure, style, tactics, grammar – and I must confess it irked me that Cox assumes the role of omniscient narrator. She changes point of view at random – sometimes paragraph by paragraph. She tells rather than shows. And the mature Lucy doesn’t quite square with the young version. Oh dear … ‘cardinal sins’ we’ve been warned against so often. Certainly not up to the standard of the master-storytellers I usually review in this blog.
BUT this author – who died three years ago aged 82 – wrote about 60 books, was published by one of the biggest British publishing houses, sold 20 million copies, and was one of the top three most-borrowed library authors. Huge success by anyone’s standard, huh? Add to that the fact that she was one of ten children, with an alcoholic father, who grew up in a mill-worker’s house in Lancashire, married at 16, and had two sons which meant she was unable to take up a university place at Cambridge, and you begin to get the measure of a quite remarkable and seriously determined woman. Who am I to judge her?! I confess, I felt thoroughly ashamed of my literary snobbery.
Points of View
The importance of the point of view (POV) is something that’s drummed into writers: 
it’s the narrative perspective from which a story is told, important because it’s the angle from which readers experience the plot, observe the behaviour of the characters, and glean information about their world. In fiction, there are four types of point of view: first person, second person, third person limited, and third person omniscient, and the appeal of the story is largely dependent on, and enhanced by, whichever you choose. I sometimes experiment with different approaches to see which provides the best angle.
But recently I’ve been increasingly struck by the importance of POV in understanding a comment or a situation or a belief in real life too. As the late Queen Elizabeth II famously said of Harry and Meghan‘s exposure of ‘their truth’ about the British Royal family: ‘perceptions may vary’. Indeedy! And she was spared the worst excesses of their revelations accruing from Harry’s book, Spare, published this week, and the accompanying interviews.
Take for example, the BBC drama, Mayflies, shown during Christmas week (yep, I know, I know, curious choice of timing for a death drama, but hey ho). Based on a novel by Andrew O’Hagan, it tells the story of the response of one man, Tully, to a terminal diagnosis and 4-month prognosis. He doesn’t want to slide into indignity and suffering and incapacity, he wants to quit at his own time in his own control and commensurate with the way he lived his whole life – joyfully, flamboyantly. He chooses Switzerland. 
But no man is an island. His life-long best friend, Jimmy, is devastated by the news, and even more so by a request for help to get Tully to Dignitas in Switzerland, especially when it involves deceit and betrayal. Tully’s partner, Anna, is equally shattered by the prospect of losing her love, even more appalled when she discovers she’s been duped, and furthermore she’s implacably opposed to the whole business of deliberately ending one’s own life. Viewed through the POV of each of the three principal characters, the whole dynamic of the story changes. I found this applied powerfully in my own book on this topic, Right to Die.
Then there’s the long-running ongoing battle to change the laws on gender recognition. If you’re a teenage boy desperate to assume a new identity as female, I’m quite sure you’d be thrilled to hear you could do so immediately without medical verification, or years of living in the assumed gender before an official change can be recognised. If you’re a woman who’s been sexually abused and you fear the invasion of private single-sex spaces, you’d probably view the prospect of relaxation in the laws with some trepidation. If you’re a male rapist and you can see new horizon’s opening for access to vulnerable potential victims … well, what would your POV look like?
Oh, and then there were the Royal Institute Christmas lectures where the always-entertaining and erudite Professor Dame Sue Black aka Baroness Black of Strome, brought in a raft of experts to show vividly how so many professionals, all with a different point of view, use forensic science to unravel a pathological scene. Brilliant presentations; fascinating insights; exploring vital factors in the pursuit of justice and fairness.
A smattering of examples, but all highlighting the need to listen attentively to, and respect others’ POVs, and to have the humility to modify our own in response to accumulating knowledge.