Perspective and Plots in the Novel

A bit late in the day for this one, a book review from The Times Literary Supplement, Stranger things: A hero’s uncanny journey into the unknown. I thought succinctly captures ideas about plot and perspective.

Someone – it might have been Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky, or possibly John Gardner; no one’s quite sure – once said that all of literature comes down to just two plots: A man goes on a journey and A stranger comes to town. At first glance, Sarah Bernstein’s second novel – published just months after her inclusion on the 2023 Granta Best of Young British Novelists list – falls firmly into the first category. The nameless narrator leaves the city of her birth and travels to a “remote northern country” – also nameless, though the evidence seems to point to somewhere in Eastern Europe – to act as a housekeeper for her brother, who has “recently freed himself from his wife and teenaged children”. She makes the journey willingly – due to her own lack of “specific obligations”, her professed desire to “see the leaves in colour, to experience the fresh air”, and her lifelong habit of perfect obedience to her siblings, of whom her brother is the eldest. On arriving, she busies herself about the house and garden, attends to her brother’s needs, and attempts to ingratiate herself with the frosty locals.

***

Perspective, in this novel, is everything. For look again at Tolstoy’s – or Gardner’s – two plots and it’s possible to see they’re one and the same, depending on where you’re standing. Bernstein’s chief brilliance in Study For Obedience is the subtlety with which she shifts our perception, from the view of the narrator to that of the townspeople. Viewed from their perspective, the narrator is the stranger, and her actions (leaving dolls woven from willow on doorsteps and windowsills, for example) are genuinely alarming. “I tried to live according to the narratives available to me”, the narrator says, in one of the novel’s delicate reveals. “With this latter point I struggled. I had difficulty … understanding my life in terms of the hero’s journey.” And while we begin this beguiling novel assuming the narrator is the hero, in the end we’re left – to our great and enduring sense of discomfort – in the position of the townsfolk, struggling to make sense of the stranger who has blown into our midst. 

sch 7/21