In summary

I like that this piece is ambitious. It reaches for advanced techniques in its quest to combine two different time periods. The use of italics and different indentation rules to define each period nod to William Faulkner’s notoriously difficult The Sound and the Fury. Indeed, the original text of this extract used two different fonts and apparently different spacing for each period (plus full justification) but the look of it on the page gave me a migraine and I had to change it. I doubt that most modern publishers would tolerate that degree of typographical jiggery-pokery. They don’t even like italics very much.

The problem is not ambition but execution. As I suggest, timeframes can be juxtaposed, but each one must be consistently handled. If we favour one, the other quickly becomes less relevant. If the juxtaposition doesn’t quickly have some purpose, it can become irritating or confusing. At some point, the narrative will have to choose to pursue one over the other or risk becoming schizophrenic. It’s a tough act to pull off.

There’s also a place for knowing narrators who involve themselves in the story, but the reader needs to know exactly how they’re involved and what this involvement means. Charlotte Brontë’s Reader, I married him or Dickens’ personal interventions into Oliver Twist are charming but relatively controlled. Herman Melville showing himself at his desk writing Moby Dick is just surreal. 19th-century or 18th-century readers might have expected such a technique and it’s also been popular in Postmodernism (Paul Auster, Martin Amis, etc) but if not handled carefully, it can quickly become smug and extraneous – a narrator unable to let the story unfold on its own terms.

What we have in this extract is technique in search of a storyline. The peril of clever writing is that it can end up being more for the author than for the reader. I speak from personal experience.