'What I Was' - Meg Rosoff

[bookgazing]

My own definition of the separation between YA and adult lit has until now been that adult literature may tell the stories of young characters, but adult novels are always written as if characters are looking back on their youth.‘What I Was’ by Meg Rosoff, is clearly labelled YA by the Spinebreakers logo on the back and the Carnegie nomination medal on the front. Yet the opening lines of the novel explain that the reader will be hearing a remembered tale, from the narrator who has now reached the ‘impossible age’ of a hundred, rather than from the lips in motion of a sixteen year old narrator:

‘…my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore.

Today, as most days, it is 1962. The year I discovered love.

I am sixteen years old.’

Once again young adult fiction beats back any attempt to define what makes a book YA.

This short piece of text that precedes the first full chapter of the novel also reminds the reader that they are being told a tale. I think this is important to keep in mind as the story progresses, because many modern books that feature a first person narrator don’t use framing to explain how their narrative comes to be written down on a page (most notably novels written in the first person present). ‘What I Was’ alerts the reader to the fact that they are hearing a story, and as the novel unfolds the reader hears more about the partiality of history and stories. I wondered if the inclusion of this first block of text was a pointed director. Is it meant to highlight the reader of the human unreliability of the narrator? Is it meant to remind readers to keep questioning Rosoff’s narrative? Is it meant to emphasise that when the reasonably sympathetic narrator says some questionable things, readers needn’t agree with everything in order to continue to sympathise with him? Questions, I has them.

The narrator tells the story of the one year he spent at the oppressive boarding school St Oswald’s when he met a boy called Finn who lived by himself on the beach. The story is told in the past tense and is heavily laced with the analysis of the older narrator. He comments on the behaviour of his younger self with the objectivity of distance and I agree with Angie, who wrote some close analysis of the narrators http://angieville.blogspot.com/2008/07/what-i-was-by-meg-rosoff.html removed perspective, that it aids the book by adding wisdom and insight to the narrative. At the same time Rosoff manages to make the boy, who is described on the page, but goes unnamed until the end, so present, plausibly knowing and extremely self-aware that it’s easy to forget that this story is being narrated from a narrator with the benefit of hindsight. The narrator (unnamed until the end) is created as an especially clear sighted teenager and I wonder how much of what he self-consciously tells us about hi characters is the remembered analysis of a teenager too much in his own head and how much of it is newer, adult analysis.

The specifics of the story will be familiar to anyone who has read a lot of stories about male boarding schools in Britain (the plot twist will also feel familiar to these readers). An average narrator shames his father and disappoints his teachers. The school is bleak; he hates the food and the other boys. It feels like a traditional story of imprisonment, escape and adoration, with an old-fashioned boarding school backdrop; a most agreeable, familiar formula because it confirms ideas that are embedded into British cultural background (female boarding schools delightfully full of cake and bonding, male boarding schools pits of hell, according to my own reading).

Still, it’s hard to feel entirely sorry for the narrator. He’s very sympathetic and clearly his time at St Oswald’s signals that everyone has already given him up to the kind of averagely, unhappy lives they’ve taken on themselves. He’s almost automatically set him up as the underdog that the reader should care about (or sets himself up as the underdog as he is telling his own story). However, having a distanced, analytical adult narrator tell this story, means that the ordinary weaknesses of a sixteen year old boy are unsparingly examined and exposed. These failings are remembered and placed again in the context of sixteen year old importance, which makes them seem monumental. As the narrator’s imperfections are pretty common human errors (jealousy, minor cruelty, desperation) readers will recognise themselves in this character and empathise with him, but being flawed in these specific ways may make readers unlikely to describe the character as likeable (probably because he cuts a little too close to the weaknesses of many people’s adolescent self).

Reading a character that shifts between being sympathetic and unlikeable is an interesting experience. The narrator despises Reese the one boy who wants to get close to him, because Reese’s adoration makes him appear weak. He shuns Reese. Then when he is presented with his own personal Jesus in the shape of Finn he struggles to keep from being pitifully over attentive. He is lucky that Finn is much more accepting than he is and when I was reading I found myself relieved for him when Finn returned his friendship. At the same time I disliked his attitude towards Reese. For me, ‘What I Was’ provided a useful reminder about compartmentalisation when reading and meeting characters. I don’t have to like everything about them to feel for them and they don’t have to be saints to be good people.

Hearing the story of a less than perfect main character did, however, leave me wondering if I should be questioning his version of events at times. This is probably partly down to my own reading baggage (I’ve read ‘Engleby’ and ‘Gentlemen and Players’ which both boarding school stories that feature main characters who aren’t always the nicest and turn out to be unreliable narrators). Finn’s lack of input into the story again made me wonder if I was meant to question the way the tale is being told. Famously books with a voiceless/inactive character have been taken up for revisionist interpretations that offer to tell a more truthful tale. Again, is this a product of my reading baggage, or is the novel offering deliberate clues? A sentence towards the end of the novel, where Finn has disappeared and the narrator tells a girl his name is Finn suggests that the narrator is involved in some nebulous dealings with his own identity, but I’m not sure how far this goes. Is the narrator’s story entirely fabricated, is he ‘Finn’, or is it just that at the end of the book he superficially ‘becomes’ Finn as a metaphor for his growing confidence? Early on in the book he says ‘It wasn’t even that I longed to see him so much as to be him’, which I took at face value, as an understandable wish of a self-conscious boy who wants to be more at ease with himself, but does it go deeper, or am I reading too much into that do you think?

I feel like I’ve been quite hard on the narrator. I don’t mean to be. I understanding him and I think he deserves compassion, because I was flawed in very similar ways to him when I was growing up and growing up is hard. So, let me end by showing you just how special his relationship with Finn was, despite anything that ever came between them:

‘As it was, nothing happened except the two of us watching the sea come in and go out again, listening to the birds, sheltering from the rain when it came in and lying silent as the sky changed from blue to white to gold. For hours we lay side by side, breathing softly together, watching thin rivulets of water run down the cliffs and into the sea, feeling the world slowly revolve around us as we leant into each other for warmth – and for something else, something I couldn’t quite name, something glorious, frightening and unforgettable.’

Aw.

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Comments

[nymeth]

Loved your thoughts on the impossibility to define YA. A definition I also often hear is that the stories always take place during the protagonist's teen years, but then you have Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea, for example, whose final three books have middled-ages to elderly heroes and heroines. Teen protagonists are definitely in the majority in YA, but even that rule has its exceptions. Which is why I'd rather go with "books whose publishers decided to market them as YA", period :P

Anyway, on to the book: it's possible that Rosoff has spread deliberate cues throughout the text, but they went completely over my head and I was genuinely surprised. Of course, that's revealing of some unpleasant truths about me and my own assumptions and blind spots (can't say more without spoilers but you know what I mean), but I kind of love how the narrative was yet another reminder that I should always confront them. I'm sure most adult readers will be much more aware than me, but this is one of those cases where I wasn't sorry to have been "fooled".

Also, I thought that his desire to be Finn and even his use of the name were more indicative of the nature of the relationship than of any shady dealings, necessarily. What I loved so much about this book was how well it captured the nature of a feeling that even at my current ripe old age I don't feel I'm entirely done with. I read it as a sort of manic pixie dream person story, but with all the aspects of those narratives I've explained I'm drawn to, and with an embedded analysis of their implications that you don't see everywhere. Which is win win for me.

PS: I do not remember the gay character dying :S #Iamhorrible

[bookgazing]

'Of course, that's revealing of some unpleasant truths about me and my own assumptions and blind spots'. It reveals quite a bit about my own education (and the reading baggage that I've got piled behind me). When I was in primary school we had a teacher who read us a story about a character named Bill, who had to climb a flag pole for adventure(idky). Anyway the twist of the story is that the character turns out to be a girl! That's always stuck with me, along with the old Enid Blyton tradition of naming girls characters boy names (George, Bill). I know Blyton's novels have their serious cultural issues, but love her for her pro-tomboy stance. Anyway I'm always on the look out for that trope now. And yeah I did wonder if I was over thinking the 'is this novel totally unreliable' area of things in light of a very tricky book called 'Gould's Book of Fish' by Richard Flanagan, which just argh, the ending, so good but so wtf!

Reese is the character unnamed narrator (Is it Hilary, or Lesley? I've forgotten exactly what his name turns out to be) heavily implies is gay (the bit about him choosing to join in with the other boys when they laugh about narrator and Finn being gay, because he has his own secrets). He's swept away to sea. I just wanted to try a new tagging way to see if it worked as a way of identifying and calling out dominant narratives...so for example for Downton posts I'd tag them with 'of course the gay character is evil'. Works/will get a bit tiring - thoughts?

Oh and the manic pixie dream narrative, yes I totally see that! It was in the back of my mind the other day when I was talking about Alex from 'The Vast Fields of Ordinary' and I talked about it a bit in comments here: http://www.phoebenorth.com/2011/06/10/death-of-a-manic-pixie/#idc-container I think this is the kind of novel that shows off all the best bits of MPD personhood (autonomy, deep quiet thought, spontenaity). Do you think it complicates things that Finn eventually turns out to be a manic pixie girl, not a boy?

Spoilers ahoy!

[nymeth]

Claire at PB Reader told me the same about the twist being easy to spot - I wonder if it's because she might have grown up with similar stories as you. I've never read Blyton! I think I'd like to one day despite the problematic aspects.

I think I missed the clues about Reese :( Will have to read again. Also, tag away! I don't think it would ever be tiring!

As for the twist complicating the manic pixie dream person narrative, hmmm, I think it does and doesn't. I suspect Rosoff was saying something very specific about how that kind of idealisation is not actually gender-dependent but something that happens between humans. BUT. The point Phoebe North made about Paper Towns still following the MPDG structure exactly even when it's suppose to question it also applies here. However, I have to confess this is a point I don't think I can get behind 100% - it assumes those narratives have no redeeming features, period. I understand why people feel that way, but like I explained in that post from a while ago, there's actually a lot about them that I value. The pattern of making the girl the object of idealisation and the boy the idealiser does bothers me, and neither Green nor Rosoff break it in the end. This saddens me, but I still love the stories for what they are. We just need MOAR stories with girls doing the desiring/idealising/being changed by another person.

Re: Spoilers ahoy! (I always forget about that)

[bookgazing]

There are Blyton books where a tomboy girl rides a horse to school! And ones where a girl rides horses in the circus. And there's the 'who is the best tomboy out there' contest in later books of Famous Five, which is both soo odd and sooo cool. I'm just not sure how well the writing would hold up...

Oh and Reese, it's one line, quite early on. I just saw it as I was adding in quotes and...it had been one of those weeks you know, where the dominant narrative appears too unthinkingly dominant all around you.

As for MPD I really think it's the dominant adherence to the dominant narrative and the 'dude learns a lesson from something that has rather serious implications for another' aspects of that trope that are bothersome, but as you so wisely said they're not the full sum of that trope. Like take 'Looking For Alaska', there's the traditional dude/girl split and the Miles defiantely learns and grows a lot, as a result of Alaska being unstable and the tragedy that follows. But there's also a whole lot more to that story and a whole lot else to Alaska. She's a person, not just a lesson, or a development tool for young dudes. And while I don't think you can discount her tragic lesson teaching part, it seems so sad to write her off as just that.

And I guess there's an element of individual reader judgement. Like sometimes the dominant narrative is just too much in that particular book and everything goes out the window with it. Sometimes it's something you can compartmentalise and examine, without getting rid of everything else. I'm not very good at compartmentalising within specific character tropes, rather than just within wider narratives, but your post made me want to try harder with my analysis.

Also oo, oo interesting 'I suspect Rosoff was saying something very specific about how that kind of idealisation is not actually gender-dependent but something that happens between humans.'