(Original Review, 1981-03-28)
When Booth came up with the idea of the "unreliable
narrator," he wasn't speaking to writers; he was reminding critics and
teachers and readers in general of something every decent writer of fiction has
always known: that a narrator is a voice, and a voice is a character, and is
still a character - a created fictional person - whether it has a name or is
just an apparently omniscient intermediary. The idea that this particular
character must for some reason be an honest (much less an accurate) portrait of
the author himself is just silly, but it's a silliness that a great many
critics once allowed themselves to fall into. If Hammett's voice in Falcon
is anything, it's purposeful and controlled, and he had to have worked very
hard on it. The idea that that voice must also be Hammett or Heinlein themselves... well, I
don't think fatuous is too strong a word. We have had very little of that kind
of fatuous talk around here (thank goodness), but at times we – me, as much as
anyone – have gone off in the opposite direction and assumed that because we
can find something in Falcon Hammett or in Strange Heinlein, must have meant for it to matter more than
the story itself. In other words, I know there’s a line but I don’t know
exactly where to draw it - and I suppose that all I want from you is a
reassurance that you agree that that line is lurking somewhere quite close by.
This is one of the books that made me appreciate Robert A. Heinlein even more. [2018 EDIT: And K. J. Parker in this day and age; if you want to know what it means to write sucessful "unreliable narrators" look no further.]
(By the way, the idea that there are male equivalents to femmes
fatales is strangely familiar to me...)
