Unwrapped Present - Catherine Butler

This month’s shameful confession is unlikely to win me many friends on ABBA - but here goes.

That fact is, I’m a bit tired of first-person present-tense narratives. I’m particularly over them in young-adult novels, where they have come to be more or less the norm. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with this way of telling a story, but it’s become increasingly ineffective at doing what it was designed for - or what I assume it was designed for.

                                                  

Let me explain by way of an analogy. Do you remember The Blair Witch Project – that horror movie from 1999 about a group of teenaged students doing a film project on a local witch legend? One of the things that made it famous was the device of presenting the story in the form of “found footage” – undirected, unedited, featuring only the real-time reactions of the students themselves. With its shaky hand-held camera, tight close-ups and poor lighting, it made the horror edgy, unpredictable, immersive.

Once The Blair Witch Project had shown what could be done in that line, a slew of other films appeared using the same technique. Some were very good – I loved Troll Hunter, for instance – but after a while, inevitably, the idea got tired, and the hand-held camera became a cliché.

Well, fashions come and go; it’s the natural way of things. Once a novelty has been chewed till it has no more flavour, it’s stuck to the bedpost of oblivion.

(Some fads inexplicably survive long beyond that point, admittedly. The vogue for sagging jeans, with underpants on lurid display, probably deserved to die young on both aesthetic and practical grounds, but it’s lasted for a generation and retains its cachet in some quarters. As long as people  keep trying to ban them - like the council of Ocala, Florida - droopy trews will no doubt retain the appeal of forbidden, low-hanging fruit, at least to their wearers. But I digress.)

I see first-person present tense as a case much like The Blair Witch Project. Like the handheld camera and the “found footage” vibe of that film, first-person present-tense narration is a way of giving a story a feeling of unmediated, moment-by-moment experience. That’s fine, and indeed many of the best YA books of the last ten years have been written this way, but the technique has assuredly lost any novelty value it may once have enjoyed. The law of diminishing returns has long since kicked in and, like an over-prescribed antibiotic, first-person present tense has become increasingly ineffective as a means of conferring “immediacy”.

Without that advantage, what does it have to recommend it? Well, sometimes it’s a useful device if the survival of the narrator is to be kept in doubt. Katniss Everdeen, the narrator of The Hunger Games, is in danger of being killed through much of that book. Arguably, if she were telling the story in the past tense then that fact would act as a guarantee of her survival beyond the last page and thus diminish the tension. But there is a debit side to present-tense narration, too – notably its demand that we imagine a protagonist who for some unknown reason is compelled to narrate everything that happens to her in real time to an audience of imaginary strangers. Literary convention may help us ignore the implausibility of this, but it’s still a little irksome.

So, I suggest we lay off the present tense for a while and explore some of the hitherto-neglected tenses. Take the future perfect, for example - so full of promise and of expectation: “It will have been the best of times, it will have been the worst of times…” 

While we’re at it, let’s really involve the reader by telling stories in the second person rather than the first:

“One morning, waking from anxious dreams, you discovered that you had been changed into a monstrous verminous insect.”

I’d read it. You would too.