Can we trust the voices placed in our heads by the author?

Lately I’ve been thinking about literary voice, particularly in the small corner of that larger field of literature that is narrative non-fiction writing. 

Voice, in literary terms, is a hazy concept; it implies that the reader perceives a human presence behind the book, one that warms up the cold words on the page. An intimacy. And where there is intimacy there is trust.

There’s a magic to voice, by which I mean it tends towards a confidence trick of the sort that enchants you while it’s underway but makes you wonder afterwards where your money went. 

It doesn’t exist on the page, or, at least, the elements for its construction might be present but won’t come to life until we read it and supply something of our own.

So, we choose to believe that there’s a voice there, and we learn to trust it. 

When there is a voice present, as in a radio programme or podcast, we decide whether we believe the speaker, and then, begin to take what they say as true. 

I’m always surprised when someone mentions a fact that they gleaned from a trusted podcaster which turns out to be closer to an urban myth. 

(But an awful lot of bullshit gets talked on live radio too, by interviewees or overstuffed, factually undernourished presenters who are desperate to fill air that would otherwise be dead.) 

In fiction, an author will often work hard to establish a trustworthy narrator, or a loveable-yet-untrustworthy narrator, and voice is often key to this. 

In non-fiction, the same rules won’t generally apply. Trust is central. We like to think that the factual material we read is empirically true, solid, authoritative.

Authority is cherished because you need to argue your way into the reader’s confidence and stay there. But once you’re there, you can squander that trust — or, in some cases, sustain that trust while lying your face off. 

Whether the reader eventually finds out is down to their own unhoodwinkability, perhaps sharpened through encounters with chancers in literature or elsewhere in life (in the pub, at the bus stop, or on the doorstep during elections).

But, and here’s the thing, there’s a creative engine that hums beneath the bonnet of the non-fiction work that undermines the notion that the writer is presenting a list of pre-existing facts in a slightly more original way. 

The research of a non-fiction book involves interpretation of material, some well-known, some obscure. 

It might include the presence of the author as a character: talking to people about a subject (how it used to be legal to smoke on the ‘upper saloon’ of buses, say) or including their own memories, if relevant (childhood memory: accidentally tasting the tobacco-laced condensation from window of bus’s upper saloon).

But it goes deeper than that, to the way a non-fiction work is structured, how you’ll research it and, crucially, what kind of effect you want to have on the reader. 

Often what ties the work together is the narration, which we’ve seen can resemble some sort of magical art that to the trusting reader mimics speech.

Sometimes I think of the non-fiction narrator as someone who is acting like an estate agent guiding the reader around a house they’ve already bought. 

Actually, let’s gentrify that comparison: instead of a house it’s an art gallery and instead of an estate agent it’s a curator. Better? 

The reader has paid their money for the house/paintings and needs the estate agent/curator to shape their journey through the rooms. 

One misstep from the guide and — to suddenly discard the laboured comparisons and get down to brass tacks — the book gets returned to the shop or thrown across the room.

But, over time, I’ve found that I’m less susceptible to the supposed charm of the narrator of non-fiction work. 

I’m tired of the half-jokes and being jostled along, pointed this way and that by our learned narrator; I’m sick of the way that the approach tends to homogenise the material. 

(In the same way that a podcast might sound the same whether the person presenting it is talking about the dog who retrieved the stolen World Cup in 1966 or the Houthi threat to shipping in the Red Sea.) 

Writers, to be successful, often feel obliged to master the language of the writerly — in other words, they convince themselves that they need to adjust their voice to fit a certain register that will connote authority, trust, warmth.

We look to non-fiction to explain a confusing world to us in a reassuring … voice. 

While fiction has become polyphonic — a multi-voiced clatter of perspectives bouncing around a made-up world that somewhat resembles our own — a broad strand of non-fiction has taken up the mantle of the 19th  century omniscient narrator (the trustworthy, godlike narrator who misses nothing, can see everyone’s motivations and can explain them in endless detail to the reader).

Look, I have to admit that this is personal. Over the last while I’ve been revisiting some material that I researched years ago but never used. 

One of the issues I encountered at the time I did the initial research was how to shape it into a non-fiction narrative that made the most of the promising documents I found in the archive. 

Should I use the non-fiction narrator’s voice to guide the reader through the story, giving wider historical context as I go, commenting where necessary, acting as the bridge between past and present in a way that speaks to the contemporary reader?

Or should I try to recreate the initial feeling I got when I encountered these documents, which was, initially at least, a certain degree of shock at the material, which involved a gruesome event in a small village. 

The documents also gave me an idea about the village itself: what the villagers did for a living, what age they were, whether they could write. 

All this could be cozily analysed by a narrator, but it would also distance the reader from the immediacy of the material.

Perhaps, I thought, a stripped-down version of non-fiction was the way to go, an approach in which the narrator is erased — or, at least, is one voice amongst many. 

But what would that look like?

I’ve admired the authors of oral histories for some time — one in particular, Jean Stein’s West of Eden, a noirish book about Hollywood, is amazing. 

But it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind: I was dealing with old documents not living voices.

Instead, I turned towards Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9 —Fog, a book that escapes classification — is it poetry, fiction that utilises factual material, non-fiction? 

It takes the form of a series of short paragraphs drawn from an actual diary, written by an 86-year-old woman, that the author fished out of a bin, adapting and rewriting the material over time and eventually, I think, restructuring it in a way that emphasises the emotional undertow of the material.

In the end, having assessed these models of how I might do it, I chose my own approach. 

Steering clear of my usual habits pushed me to find a new way. In many cases you must raise your voice to give a piece of writing its character; here I sought to dial that voice down, even erase it. 

I’m still not completely certain that it will work, but what it’s underlined for me is that the form a piece of writing can be adjusted, even radically changed, to suit the material you’re working on and the effect you want to have on the reader.