One of the most impressive aspects of The Slap was Tsiolkas's handling of narration: each chapter of that novel took the viewpoint of a different character, who picked up the story at a later stage in events.
"Is this not our postmodern, post-colonial prerogative?" Interspersed with Barry's present-day narration are chapters from the point of view of his wife, Carmel, which begin on her lonely wedding night, when she's a clueless teenager marvelling at the "diamante sky, stretching yonder into infinity", while her husband snores.
The book continues Riordan's use of third person narration, where chapters are from the point of view of one of the main characters, switching between Percy, Frank, and Hazel.
Kubrick's previous two films, "2001" and "A Clockwork Orange," had been successful enough to entice Warner Brothers to invest $11 million in 183 minutes of episodic storytelling complete with third-person voiceover narration and printed chapter headings.
Ondaatje slips in and out of this partial vantage, taking over the narration for some chapters, leaving others in Anna's voice.
The twist here is that Su – whose voice breaks up the third person narration in alternate chapters, more or less – is a swotty, extremely well-behaved teenager (she can't even swear).
Katharine's narration alternates with chapters about Daniel and Salman Levy, 19th-century Jewish traders who acquire a jar of engraved gems and travel to London with the stones sewn inside their cloaks.
Though the narration in Theodosia's chapters hews to her point of view, Parker ties other aspects of the contemporary plot to its central characters, providing "Rashomon -like views of the novel's events.
Almost every chapter of her narration makes visible the gap between the recent and the distant.
Mixing (what looks like) authentic home movie footage with psychedelic animation, on-screen text (redacted and scratched), public Q&As, bookish chapter headings, interrogative narration and an entire short film (How Would You Feel?), which is wound, rewound, screened, discussed, reinvented and dismissed within the course of the main feature, this is mind-boggling fare indeed.
