Using a variety of narrators to give different perspectives is a well used structural device in novels. The most sparkling of those that I can remember is Ali Smith’s How To Be Both.  George and Francesco’s narratives, so separate, so interwoven, can be read in either order.  Some books were published with George first and others with Francesco – the experience inevitably being completely different. Until now, I had not read a book with only one chapter with an omniscient third person narrator – slap bang in the middle of a book with three different narrators. The Help beautifully creates the sounds of the South of the United States through the dialect, vocabulary and preoccupations of the three female protagonists, Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter.

Aibileen – gentle, loving, forgiving, but hard and worn from decades of pain and difficulty, speaks with a fairness to her tone which seems all the more saintly considering what she has had to live with. The dialect she uses, strangely stronger in tone that Minny’s, creates a warm and vivacious sound in the reader’s ear, even if it is sometimes hard for this white, English-woman to catch the flow of the narrative as easily as others might.

Minny – the younger, fiercer friend of Aibileen, speaks with the passion and anger that the reader feels the subject of discrimination deserves. Her ‘sass’ and plain speaking, her loyalty, her pride, her strength and daring, all stand out from the page.  I believe I could detect Minny’s voice even if her name was not written at the head of the chapter.

Skeeter – is the young woman who makes the journey the author presumably hopes the reader will make – from blind acceptance of the status quo to a deeper understanding of the people and the society around her. Her voice is clearly different again in tone, dialect and ideas. Her coming of age mirrors the reader’s developing understanding of the intricacies of segregated America. Reading as someone who does not instinctively know about white-black relations in Mississippi, but who has read and seen the usual things, Skeeter’s voice is a step away from my own experience, but her ignorance is also mine.

The idea that the book is written by a white woman about the experiences of black women, in a time in which she has not lived, might be controversial. To write in the voice a black woman when you have not lived as one, might be criticised by some. I am not going to make that criticism. Who am I, a white Northumbrian, to make a judgement on such things?  But Kathryn Stockett obviously felt this unspoken criticism:

I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person.

To me, however, the voices seem authentic and the intention pure. If Skeeter’s had been the only voice, the book would have lost its richness, its intense scrutiny of the heart of racist America. If Aibileen and Minny had been the only ones to be heard, we would not have seen the awakening of understanding that Stockett would want her readers to experience.

In giving the reader three female narrators, we look at the actions from those three different viewpoints. We see Hilly’s history with Skeeter, her honesty and their closeness. Without Skeeter’s narrative, the reader would struggle to see why Skeeter would ever be friends with such a woman. Even with Skeeter’s perspective, that part of the novel was the hardest for me to accept. We could not have seen Minny’s heroic suffering in a violent marriage, but for Aibileen’s perspective, nor seen Minny’s love for and dependence on him but for her own perspective.  We also experience different relationships through the three woman narrators: Celia and Minny, Stuart and Skeeter, Minny and Leroy, Aibileen and Treelore. The richness of the interplay between all three is magnified through this adeptly used narrative structure.

However, Chapter 25, the only third person narrative in the book, is, for me, a failure of imagination. Could this not have been written by one of the characters in a way in which we could have understood the action, perhaps even more than we in fact were able to?  It could have been Hilly’s caustic voice, or Johnny Foote’s, or even Celia’s.  I realise all of those create problems with the narrative and would give each character more knowledge that they in fact had.  Skeeter was the observer of the event; she could have recounted it so that the reader understood the whole of the story, even if she did not.

I hesitate to criticise a book I truly admire, particularly because I could not ever have created such a masterpiece myself, so who am I to disparage it?  I don’t see what good chapter 25’s narrative structure did.  Instead it broke down the close bond I had been developing with the characters when I heard the cold, dispassionate voices of the god-like narrator. To others, no doubt, it is an interesting facet of a beautifully written novel.  I would like to hear someone disagree with me in my unease at this strange hiatus that chapter 25 creates. It is a fascinating book, and certainly singular in its structure.