Voice and Narration, Part 2: Philip Pullman’s Brilliant Use of Third-Person Omniscient

Our next-to-last snowshoe hike, February 2024.

One of my favorite writers, Philip Pullman, has big points to make in his novels. He tackles ambitious topics like the role of religion in society (see His Dark Materials fantasies) and the impact of capitalism on society (see the Sally Lockhart historical mysteries).

I love his Sally Lockhart mysteries. He uses third-person omniscient narration for this series. It’s hard to imagine any other choice being as effective for these stories.

Here’s the beginning of the third novel in the Lockhart series, The Tiger in the Well:

One sunny morning in the autumn of 1881, Sally Lockhart stood in the garden and watched her little daughter play, and thought that things were good.

She was wrong, but she wouldn’t know how or why she was wrong for twenty minutes yet. The man who would show her was still finding his way to the house. For the moment she was happy, which was delightful, and she knew she was, which was rare; she was usually too busy to notice (3).

I get the sense that the narrator cares about Sally and that Sally is worth caring about. By the end of the first 2 pages, Pullman summarizes Sally’s situation: her home, her financial consulting business, her friends, her dead lover, and her illegitimate two-year-old daughter.

This economical storytelling is useful for giving readers the basic context before plunging them into the story. As Orson Scott Card writes in Characters & Viewpoint, “The omniscient narrator can tell more story and reveal more character in less time than it takes the limited third-person narrator” (159).

Conveying attitude—or, another way to think of narrative voice

The ability to convey any or all characters’ thoughts is one of the hallmarks of the omniscient viewpoint. But, as Nancy Kress points out, “Dipping into characters’ minds at will without also offering a strong authorial presence . . . is not omniscient POV; it’s just sloppy multiple third person” (Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint, 210).

Pullman’s “authorial presence” is one of the joys of reading him. He is wittiest when his narrator dips into an unsavory character’s mind and gives his interpretation of that character.         

For example, a lawyer working for a man who claims to be Sally’s husband is described like this: “Mr. Gurney, whose conscience, though it had largely drained away, had left the odd puddle of fastidiousness behind . . . what imagination and sympathy and human concern he’d been born with had trickled away with his conscience years before” (84–85).

Pullman takes delight in bringing his antagonistic characters down a peg. Up until Parrish, the man claiming to be Sally’s husband, makes a mistake and lets Sally get away, Pullman has depicted him as a smart man, a man who reads to improve himself, a criminal on his way up.  

But once the lead villain learns of Parrish’s error, Parrish must explain, and the narrator gets to have a little fun:

Mr. Parrish would have been nervous but for the fact that he was applying the principles of Oriental mind control, as expounded by the great mystic Wu Shu-Fan in a book Mr. Parrish had purchased the previous spring. Deep breathing was involved, and a spiral movement of the psychic energies around the spinal column.

His psychic energies corkscrewing briskly upward, his breathing profound and diaphragmatic, Mr. Parris faced his patron with equanimity . . . (213–­214).

Sally is portrayed with the greatest amount of sympathy. Readers frequently have access to her thoughts. Pullman pulls in so close at times that it feels like limited third person. He even uses a bit of first person, that most intimate viewpoint, to show how confused she is by this bizarre claim that her supposed husband wants custody of her daughter: “Why? What’s he after? What have I done to him? Why? And who is he?” (16).

When Sally and her daughter are on the run, and Sally is at her emotional limit, some of her diary entries are revealed: “What I must do, since I can’t prove H. is not his daughter, is find out why he’s doing it and what’s behind it. Behind him. Find out everything I can.” (133–134).

Showing readers this bit of Sally’s diary rather than having her sit and simply think all of these things also adds a subtle bit of characterization: Sally is a careful, logical thinker and a woman of action.

Managing narrative distance

Orson Scott Card claims that the “omniscient narrator sees the world through the wrong end of the binoculars—readers can see everything, but it all looks very small and far away” (160). Maybe Card hasn’t read Pullman.

Pullman uses a variety of distances, near to far. He does not limit himself or the reader by standing way back all the time. He maneuvers his narrative camera to the most appropriate, most effective position for each point in the story.  

He moves in close, as in the examples above with Sally, when character emotions are running high and when it’s most important for the reader to feel what the character feels. He pulls back to explain things such as the difference between a barrister and a lawyer and the immigration of Jews to London. He probably does this for the benefit of younger readers.

Pullman uses this far back camera position, the position from which he provides context for events, sparingly. When he does spend time on something that seems to have no direct bearing on any of the characters, readers can be confident that they’ll soon learn why this information is useful.

For example, at the start of book three (aka, part 3), Pullman spends two pages on the rain, the London sewers’ capacity to handle lots of rain, and a river that was built over during the 17th century. Said river has been forgotten ever since, and is now swollen with rain.

His description of what flows in the Blackbourne River is funny in a morbid way (including the name): filth from forgotten sewers, blood from a slaughterhouse, waste chemicals from a dye works, and “the essences of several dozen long-dead plague victims. . . [The river] scoured away ancient mortar and lime and cement when it was swollen after a storm. And if you were below ground, you could hear it” (266).

That last quote clues the reader in to a general location—below ground. When the camera moves closer for a bit of dialogue, “`What’s that noise, Charlie?’” (266), the reader knows intuitively that the speaker is in a cellar or basement.

The noise, of course, is the river. The reader knows this because of the past two pages, but no one in the story knows that a poisonous, swollen river is flowing just inches beneath their feet.

Pullman smoothly maneuvers the sense of narrative distance. He starts with a broader idea of the rain and London storm sewers, then moves in closer to a specific example of that idea, namely the Blackbourne, and then eases into the brief scene with the painter hearing the river.

Advantages of the third-person omniscient point of view

Nancy Kress summarizes the advantages as “emphasis on the author’s interpretation of the story, broad context for its events, a richer presentation, and the ability to play with notions about reality” (210­–211).

She also cautions that readers need to be convinced that reading such an “author-infused story” will be “worthwhile.” She notes that

The usual practice is to convince us early on that this author will offer a viewpoint so interesting, amusing, or novel that it will compensate for his intrusive presence. . . . If you cannot do this, if your writing is serviceable rather than interesting on a prose level, you might do better to choose multiple-third-person over omniscient POV (209).          

How to choose the right POV

How do writers choose whether to write in first person or third person? From one character’s point of view or multiple characters’ POV? And what are the trade-offs?

These are the kinds of things I think about with my own work and the kinds of things I discuss with my book coaching clients. (If you’d like to see how I could help you, send me an email: bookcoach@micheleregenold.com.)

One of my clients (I’ll call her Kayla) initially submitted pages for her middle grade contemporary novel in limited third person. Her main character came across to me as kind of whiny and bratty. Kayla hadn’t considered narrating the story in first person. But when she gave it a try, her main character’s voice lit up the book.

I don’t know that there’s one “right” point of view for any given story. It depends, at least in part, on the point that you’re making. And experimenting with different ways of telling your story can yield exciting results.

What POV do you gravitate toward?