Can You Trust Him?: The Rosie Project and the Unreliable Narrator

I'll say right at the outset that Graeme Simion's The Rosie Project is a delightful novel. Simsion has a light touch and has created a completely engaging narrative voice that has just the right balance of objective distance and lack of self awareness.

This balancing act of objectivity and the inability to see himself clearly shows the ways in which Simsion is playing with the motif of the unreliable narrator. This figure plays a key role in creating narrative tension--an unreliable narrator who, at least at first, gives the impression of telling the reader everything in an open and trustworthy way means, when handled well, that the author can conceal the story in plain sight. Think of Lockwood, Wuthering Heights's opening narrator, who has absolutely no insight into Heathcliff's household. Or, Agatha Christie's criminal narrator in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a narrative innovation which outraged many of her readers.

Simsion gives us a narrator whose scientific mindset, obsession with standardizing all aspects of his life, and social ineptitude allow him to dissect every encounter in a seemingly insightful and objective way. Of course, Don Tillman, the narrator, is completely deaf to all emotional aspects of any scene, which means that he has both uncanny insight into what is happening around him and doesn't get it at all.

What makes this really work, though, is Simsion's comedic touch. The Rosie Project is a funny novel. Reading this novel is a little like one of those thought experiments where a space alien arrives on earth and has to have the function of all objects and bahavioral norms explained. The humor is not accidental, either, and it brilliantly shows (rather than tells) what Don means when he says that he adopted humor as a defense mechanism.

While this novel works in many ways, it also made me wonder if it would have worked better as a short story. Not that it felt too long, but rather that the conceit of Don's hyper-objective narrative voice would have been so well suited to the freedom of the short story to capture a moment and move on without needing to adhere to the machinery of a novel's plot. For me, the novel worked less well toward the end when Don's narrative moves toward the inevitable conclusion and greater level of emotional awareness. The novel ends the way that the plot dictates that it should, but I felt a little sad to see it happen.