Zahabi's Newsletter Jan/Feb 25
Unreliable narrators with Trouble on Triton by Delany, wintry hikes, and The Lightborn paperback release.
Dear reader,
Let’s start the year with unreliable narrators, layered storytelling where facts and lies overlap, by analysing a couple of books, including Trouble of Triton by Samuel Delany and The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. I’ll also chat a bit about wintry hikes and – last but not least – The Lightborn’s paperback release.
What’s happening with the book – The Lightborn out in paperback!
If you’re looking to save some money, the paperback edition of The Lightborn is coming out soon – it’ll be available on 6 February 2025. I must admit I’m particularly fond of paperbacks, and most of my library is filled with them. So if you want to enjoy the whole trilogy without filling up your bookshelf (or breaking the budget), you can now do so.
Or if you haven’t had the chance to read the trilogy yet, and were waiting for all the books to be out in paperback, now’s the time to dive in!
Freed from his prison cell, the former slave known as Tatters is finally ready to face his past. Now his true nature is known to all, he can use his powers freely. But they come at a price, and his loyalties remain conflicted. The renegades about to attack the city used to be his companions, and both sides have treated him badly. He will have to decide which side to choose.
Isha had thought Tatters was dead, and is overjoyed to see him return. But her master, one of the most powerful mages, has a past with them both, one which might make their reunion impossible. The mages remain divided, and in order to survive they will need to come together, and put aside past arguments. They too have a choice.
And outside the city, the renegades continue to advance. Destruction of the mages is their only goal, and nobody knows if they can be stopped…
What’s happening on the page – Unreliable Narrators
An unreliable narrator – in which the character telling the story isn’t being truthful – can be deeply satisfying. Well-done, it feels a bit like a puzzle. When readers realise the narrator is unreliable, they start “decoding” what’s being said to them, in order to understand what’s truly happening. There is a distance between the facts of the story and their telling, allowing for a more layered narrative.
Although an unreliable narrator can be rewarding for the reader, it can also be hard to pull off, because the fact that the narrator isn’t being truthful has to be the point of the story – it’s hard to justify telling readers something which isn’t accurate, if that inaccuracy, those omission and lies, aren’t part of the story itself.
How do we know the narrator is unreliable? Well, all narrators are biased, in some respect, and it can be fun for a writer to use contrasting POVs to reveal each character’s blind spots. I’d use the term “unreliable” if we’ve got a strong reason to believe the story, as it happens, doesn’t match what the narrator is telling us. The reader’s assumption will be that the narrator is truthful, until proven otherwise. So an unreliable narrator has to give themselves away, has to slip, in order to clue in the reader that there’s more to find.
One way to reveal this is to play on the difference between dialogue and prose. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro is a good example – although the narrator will never admit to being upset, someone might remark in dialogue that he’s crying. Trouble on Triton by Samuel Delany shows us the narrator is unreliable by having him state out loud things that directly contradict the emotions he expressed while he was narrating to us directly.
Trouble on Triton is an interesting example about how speculative genres can use unreliable narrators to make a point. It’s a rich, bustling SF story set on Triton, with a lot of political intrigue happening (including an inter-planetary war Triton is on the cusp of getting involved in). Still, it mostly focuses on how mindsets are fashioned by society, and how changing a society can change people’s mindset. The story both follows and questions its main character, a man stuck in a patriarchal mindset who isn’t seeing his own failings, or why he isn’t able to be happy despite Triton’s many freedoms.
(Delany’s book is rich and complex, and I have a sense I’ll have to read it more than once to fully absorb it. It’s also an answer to The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, subtitled An Ambiguous Heterotopia. I’m sure there’s more in-depth literary analysis out there. I’ll just focus on one aspect of the book, but it’s well worth a read – the original worldbuilding challenges our view of future societies, what we think gender, clothing, food, housing, could look like.)
Trouble on Triton is structured around a love story, but it becomes quickly obvious why the relationship will fail. The unreliability is foreshadowed once. Our main character justifies one of his actions (getting a colleague fired) by giving us a reason that happened after he fired her – the order of the facts makes it impossible for him to be telling the truth. He even acknowledges, uncertainly, that maybe he learnt about this fact too late for it to be the reason behind him disliking her, but his account is muddled and uncertain. As readers, it’s tempting to just let it slide. He was jealous, emotionally fragile, we assume he doesn’t usually lie – this was just a confusing moment for him.
Much later in the book, he goes to help a group of people stuck in a dangerous area, at risk of getting their gravity cut off. We know, following him through his narration, that he would’ve let them fend for themselves. He was pushed to help by his friend Lawrence, and does so reluctantly. But when he talks about the rescue later on, he takes the credit, he talks about how brave he was. We know it wasn’t on his mind at the time – we know he’s telling something more flattering to his ego than what actually took place. By now, as readers, we’re clued in that this narrator isn’t honest with others, and not even honest with himself.
The penultimate scene of the book, in a lot of ways the climax of the story, is a long rant from our main character about his love interest. We know he’s lying. But he lies in an interesting way – all his complaints about her, everything he reproaches his love interest, are things that he does. Everything he says about her is a lie – but it’s true if applied to him. He’s revealing his hand, in dialogue, in a clever way, by projecting his issues onto someone else.
“She was just completely dishonest. About everything.”
“But she simply has no concept of what’s real and what’s fantasy […] Because when that fantasy seeps into the reality, she just becomes an incredibly ugly person. She feels she can distort anything that occurs for any purpose she wants. Whatever she feels, that’s what is, as far as she’s concerned.”
People project in real life – this is both a clever literary trick and a psychological truth. I’d never seen this sleight-of-hand in fiction, but Delany does it skilfully.
Because of their lies, unreliable narrators tend to be unlikeable. After all, we often hide our ugly sides from our peers. In Trouble on Triton, the unreliability allows us to explore this vibrant world and enjoy it, despite a narrator who is, deep down, rather unpleasant. As we discover the limits of our narrator, his nastiness, we stop wanting to spend time with him – but by then, we’ve reached the end of the book. Unreliability serves as a screen for unlikability, delaying the moment when the reader becomes angry with the character.
In The Remains of the Day, unreliability is used to hide a tragedy, to make the story more poignant. The narrator remains likeable, because what he’s trying to hide from us, what he’s trying to repress, are his emotions – grief, love. He’s not hiding his bad side in order to look good; he’s hiding, even from himself, the pain he feels. His feelings then hits harder because, rather than being told about them, we intuit them for ourselves from the hints given. We put the pieces together, so we work to assemble that pain; and by doing so, we feel it more.
Unreliable narrators can also help us challenge our assumptions. If we assume something from them, that wasn’t explicitly said, what does that reveal about us as readers? Delany uses his narrator to challenge our interpretation of what we might, at first glance, have taken at face value as being a romance with a fickle woman, the likes of which we’ve read before (it turns out it’s the man who is fickle, and the woman’s being pretty reasonable). Bettý by Arnaldur Indriðason also plays with the reader’s assumption that a first-person narrator in a noir crime novel would be male, by hiding the narrator’s gender until midway through the book.
To summarise, unreliable narrators allow for a lot of interesting storytelling moments – from heightening emotions to creating a puzzle for the reader to unravel, from making an unlikeable character bearable to challenging expectations. It’s not always easy to strike the correct balance between a story readers can believe in, and lies the narrator is weaving in, but when done successfully it can make for a wonderful book.
What’s happening with me – Wintry walks
I spend so much time indoors – working, writing – that for me, relaxing often means being outdoors. I’ve been on some frosty walks around Guildford, during the short January daylight. Sancho has been enjoying snow and snowballs, and hating the fireworks that inevitably happen during the festive period.
I also went to watch the Guildford lights over the holidays. It was a nice way to enjoy the early night, by watching the flickering lights and eating roasted marshmallows – all good remedies against the winter blues.
