H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e3 8hand. Indeed, the passage makes him sound reasonably active and
well organised, so perhaps this is an unmerited put- down on
the narrator’s part. We assume that the narrator is a man, by the
way, partly because men are more likely to commit murder than
women; partly because when women do kill, they are unlikely to
do so by smashing in their victim’s jaw with a spade; and partly
because the narrator and Divney sound like long- standing male
cronies. Male authors also tend to favour male narrators. But all
this could be presumptuous.
Artlessness of this kind demands a good deal of art. O’Brien’s
prose has the air of being unsculptured, but the whole paragraph
is meticulously set up for maximum dramatic impact. Note, for
example, how the arresting effect of the opening confession (‘Not
everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers’) is reinforced
by the fact that it is cast in the negative. (This, as it happens, is a
work of fiction much concerned with negativity, so it is fitting that
its first word should be ‘Not’.) ‘I killed old Phillip Mathers’ would
lack the shocking off- handedness of the opening sentence, which
gains some of its unnerving power from letting us know that the
narrator murdered Mathers while appearing to be focused on
something else (the fact that not everybody is aware of it). If this
is a blunt assault on the reader’s sensibilities, it is also a faintly
devious one. No sooner has the narrator made his momentous
declaration than the sentence swerves abruptly aside from it (‘but
first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney’). This,
too, is a crafty way of increasing the force of the opening announce-
ment. The reader is left open- mouthed while the narrator moves
coolly on to another topic, as though unaware of the shattering
nature of what he has just revealed. There is, incidentally, some-
thing slightly strange about the phrase ‘Not everybody knows how