On 4_Mystery_Addicts(link is external) this week there has been a fascinating discussion about Unreliable Narrators, and I've wanted to expand this out to consider local books.
It's a term that was discussed in some depth by the group a while ago (from memory a group member did a PhD on the subject), so it's something that might need to be defined for others. Basically what we're talking about is the point of view from which the story is being told (the Narrator) when isn't necessarily playing straight with the reader (the Unreliable).
A narrator can be seen as unreliable for a few reasons, and most of them are considerably more subtle than just an author not playing fair. An unreliable narrator could be the relating of clues or observations which is edited by the author so that important points aren't discernible to the reader. Mind you, that's probably more in the unreliable author than narrator stakes but I digress.
Some of the good uses of an unreliable narrator can be a morally ambiguous protagonist - somebody who is revising the truth to suit their own purposes or view of the world. Another excellent use is simply the variance in memory - where events change with the passage of time, or even where the narrator is seeing things from a different perspective than perhaps you would normally expect. Either way the author must play fairish with the reader and allow the reader to understand how the narrator is working / seeing things.
Anyway - the discussion got me thinking about unreliable narrators in Australian and New Zealand crime fiction. Mostly probably because the book that triggered in my mind was Ghostlines by Nick Gadd. The ultimate unreliable narrator, Trudeau is somebody who is working in a different form of reality. But Gadd plays 100% fair with the reader as there are hints all the way through about the truth of the situation - the reader can get a pretty good idea that things are not quite as they seem. Ultimately it made for a ripper of a debut book.
Another book that has a slight dodgy narrator is Paul Cleave's first The Cleaner. Now it's not an immediate conclusion you could draw - there is something profoundly centred and truthful about his central narrator, but he's ultimately partially unreliable in that he's convincing others around him of something that isn't the truth, and for a little while a reader can be excused for wondering which reality is the real reality. (Or at least that's how it recalls to me). Robert Gott has also written a deliciously unreliable narrator in his books - of course the joke in them is that everybody but William Power knows he's totally unreliable. But he is still seeing things from a rather particular (and somewhat peculiar) point of view - the good thing about those books is that the rest of us know.
But other than those examples, I can't think of a lot of other unreliable narrators in Australian Crime fiction (now that I've written that there will be dozens and I'll be loudly called a complete moron for forgetting.... )