The Spiral Staircase by Ethel Lina White: narration

I suspect many contemporary novelists would be scandalized by the nimble flexibility of the narrator used by White in this remarkable novel. Omniscient narrators are currently out of fashion.

First published in 1933, it is a classic thriller of a type common at the time. A young woman takes a job in a remote country house and learns a murderer is on the loose. It only gradually dawns on her that she is to be the next victim.

“Helen realized that she had walked too far just as daylight was beginning to fade.” This opening suggests we’ll be told the tale in close third from Helen’s point of view. True, but not entirely.

By the end of Chapter 2, we’ve switched to a narrator who warns us that Helen “was visited by no prescience to warn her that…there had been certain trivial incidents which were the first cracks in the wall of her fortress. Once they were started, nothing could stop the process of disintegration; and each future development would act as a wedge, to force the fissures in ever-widening breaches, letting in the night.”

Both points of view are designed to fill the reader with trepidation, and both are very effective. White’s many novels did well, and her work was adapted for the screen by Alfred Hitchcock and others. Indeed, this volume has just been re-issued by Pushkin Press.

As Emma Darwin says, we needn’t throw out three hundred years’ worth of novelistic technique for the sake of fashion.