on the mind of a single focalising character. Most novels which are third-person
narrations include at least one focalising character, and this has important implications
for the kind of language used, because in the vast majority of books written for children
there is only one such focaliser, who is a child (or ersatz child, such as Bilbo in The
Hobbit). Further, as with first person narrators, readers will tend to align themselves
with that focalising character’s point of view.
[James] knew he shouldn’t go into the house—it wasn’t his house. But that wasn’t
the reason why he wanted the street to be empty when he walked up the little path.
What he knew and what he felt were two different things. He felt that going into that
house had to be something he did secretly, as though it were night and he moved
among shadows.
The door was open enough to let him slip in without pushing it. Sunlight didn’t
penetrate the dirty windows, so he stood still until his eyes grew accustomed to the
darkness. Then, as he smelled the dusty old rooms and the dampness of the
wallpaper that was peeling off the walls, other things he felt came swimming
towards him through the gloom like fish.
Fox 1967/1972:28The text is shaped by the presence of represented thought and by direct or implied acts
of perception. The narrative representation of thought—marked here by the verbs ‘knew’
and ‘felt’—situates events within the character’s mind but also enables a separate
narrating voice. This narration is always evident here in such aspects of register as the
quite complex left-branching syntax of the final sentence and lexical items such as
‘penetrate’ and ‘accustomed’, and by the use of analogies and figurative language. James
is a 10-year-old, whose own linguistic level is shown to be a scant competence with a
Dick and Jane reader (20), and there is no evident attempt at this moment to match
linguistic level of narrative discourse to that of the character, though that does often
happen. There is, nevertheless, an obvious contrast with the Danziger passage, which,
despite having a much older main character (14), has access to a more limited range of
registers. Figurative language is likewise less complex. Lauren’s ‘I can feel the knot in
my stomach and I feel like I’m going to jump out of my skin’ are cliché analogies,
whereas in ‘other things he felt came swimming towards him through the gloom like fish’
the ground of the concrete/abstract comparison foregrounds the double meanings of
‘swimming’ and ‘gloom’, opening out the space between sign and referent and giving
readers an opportunity to draw inferences which are not fully determined by the text
but have room to include more personal associations.
The last sentence of the Fox extract is unusual in its complexity, however, because
complex sentences, especially in conjunction with complex focalisation, tend rather to
be the province of more difficult Young Adult fiction. In general, most fiction for children
up to early adolescence is characterised by a lexis and grammar simplified relative to the
notional audience: sentences are right-branching, and within them clauses are mainly
linked by coordination, temporality or causality; and the use of qualifiers and figurative
language is restricted. Even the passage cited from Low Tide, which has a very subtle
effect (and Mayne is often thought of as a writer of ‘difficult’ texts), is entirely right-
64 LINGUISTICS AND STYLISTICS