In "The Star Beast":
Avi, already distraught, comes face to face with a tiger and almost screams but then realizes that this can only be her friend, Harol, who had become a tiger and whom she had fed raw meat when he had visited her in this form. This is Avi's pov (point of view).
Without any break in the narrative, she addresses him and he remembers sounds which we, the readers, recognize as words although they have become meaningless to him. This is his pov.
Thoas looks at Ankhsenamen and finds her:
"...lovely to behold." (p. 117)
This is his pov. In the next paragraph, Ankhsenamen looks at Thoas and his men. She is not used to the hardness that she sees in his face and, as for the men, they are:
"...uncouth and ill-favored, and she wondered with a brief chill if this was the best way after all." (pp. 117-118)
This is her pov.
OK. We notice this, or at least some of us do, but we also know that povs are nearly always fully controlled in Poul Anderson's later works.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
All this reminds me of how, after Tutankhamen's death, his widow Ankhesenamen was pressed to marry Ay, a powerful courtier, so he could become Pharaoh. It's possible she sent a truly extraordinary letter to the Hittite King Suppililiuma I, asking that he send one of his sons to her to marry, making him Pharaoh. Because Ankhesenamen did not want to marry one of her subjects.
Sometimes we get glimpses of struggles and conflicts dating thousands of years ago!
Ad astra! Sean
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