Flavor-Added Telling

I recently discovered a new author or, more accurately, an old author who is new to me. Her name is Elizabeth Cadell, and the first book I read was The Fledgling.

In some ways, I’m surprised that I liked the book. It begins with an omniscient narrator and long passages of “telling” rather than showing. Omniscient narrators have gone out of style because it is hard to do them correctly, and most sound like failed efforts at third-person point-of-view. Fortunately, Cadell gets it right.

She also manages to succeed with her “telling.” The longest passages come at the beginning of The Fledgling and soon give way to mostly showing. But the telling in the early passages did not bother me, probably for the same reason that I don’t mind the telling that often begins books by classic authors such as George Eliot and Charles Dickens. It’s what I call flavor-added telling because it is seasoned with salt and pepper and other spices.

The Fledgling is the story of a ten-year-old girl who was living in Portugal and is now being sent to school in England. Illness keeps her original travelling companions at home, so an acquaintance of Tory’s father is substituted at the last minute. Here are some examples of the flavor-added telling that Cadell uses to introduce her protagonist.

Tory, sent down before dinner to be presented to [Mr. Darlan], disliked him on sight, and resented being spoken to as though she was six instead of ten. But she had long ago perfected the art of concealing her feelings, and reminded herself that if he had not offered to travel with her, she might have been sent by air in the care of a TAP hostess, thus missing the novel experience of two nights on a train. After the exchange of a few polite sentences, she was permitted to retire, and Mr. Darlan, having no powers of divination, filed her as a mousey, well-mannered little thing, not pretty and certainly no conversationalist; one of those tongue-tied children out of whom monosyllables had to be dragged.

* * *

Young as [Tory] was, every servant in the house knew her discretion to be absolute; their secrets were as safe with her as hers were locked within herself.

* * *

[Tory] sat motionless but relaxed, her expression serious and attentive, her mind elsewhere, lending as always a dutiful eye and a deaf ear. She never fidgeted, never interrupted; she had never been heard to contradict. She agreed with everything that was planned for her, and made her own arrangements later, for she had discovered that the easiest way through life was to set out obediently upon the appointed path and then slip away down a side turning.

Cadell could have said, “Tory was a quiet child who kept her thoughts to herself.” That is pure telling, and it’s boring. Or the author could have shown Tory acting compliant in public but doing something contrary in private, but that would have taken more time. So she uses flavor-added telling to draw the reader in. Cadell announces Tory’s personality, as in pure telling, but also gives us examples that help us see her as a person rather than a description. And this element of “sight” nudges the passage closer to the showing line.

I believe in showing rather than telling most of the time.

But flavor-added telling has its own charm.