I was thinking it over today, wondering where the idea of the neutral toned infodump came from. Most of the old novels I grew up reading had distinctive narrative voices--with, in fact, distinct narrators. But first person narrators not part of the story went out of fashion along with omni roughly the time that realism and cinema-narration became popular.
At least, the few cinema-narrators I've read, like Raymond Chandler, might play around with describing the action from a camera-eye view (to the extent of describing an arm reaching up, the click of a light, the ring of a telephone, in an opening of a chapter)--all of it outside of anyone's head, including the protagonist's. All neutral. Detached. Distant. Of course for a time the detached distance was the coolest thing in books and films for a time. I remember watching one of those mid-sixties spy things wherein everyone, and I mean everyone, went about blank-faced no matter who was chasing, threatening, shooting, or seducing whom. Nobody reacts, except the woman purses her lips and looks coy once in a while. Not just the spy flicks. Those westerns. I remember seeing the beginning of one of the Clint Eastwood ones, where he enters a town (and everyone is isolated, silent, with as much affect as a zombie on megadoses of Zanax), shoots a gun slinger in cold blood, then grabs hold of a woman who begins to fight (though managing to struggle with no real expression), throws her down in a barn, and rapes her--and of course she surrenders to his tough guy lust--obviously just needed to be tamed. At that point I was so nauseated I left, and never did see the rest. I'm sure it's equally hip, cool, detached, with a body count of 456,782.
Anyway. I remember reading a bunch of current novels that followed the same trend. All in tight third, as detached and neutral as could be. So my question becomes, is the fashion for tight third responsible for the sense that there ought to be no voice, that the narrator not only invisible, but not even present?
Infodumps have to be timed--the idea is to present the info when the characters need the info, and therefore the reader really wants to know, too. But even so, a neutral slodge of heavy-sentence graphs can slow any story down. It's so much easier to read info when there's some emotional color--whatever the emotion.
I get caught by any humorous narrative voice. But that's certainly not the only kind that works. The narrative voice of Susanna Clarke's novel is not at all like Jane Austen's wry, witty, compassionate voice--yet it's full of subtle emotional color that increasingly imbues the story with a vague unease, a sense that the world is far stranger than one assumed, that we are trapped inside a Faberge egg. People who like Lovecraft tell me he has a gift for a nightmare voice, one of building horror. (Which is why I have never tried to reread any Lovecraft, after my one failed experiment as a teen.) Mary Renault had a distinctive narrative voice, passionate, sensitive to sensory beauty. Etc.
A narrative voice doesn't have to be a character, it seems to me, but it must have character.
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So, there's a lot more to 'camera-eye' than the sort of robotic thing you described above. The camera can be focused on real humans instead. And dwarves. :-)
We react to a good narrative voice, but it's so hard to find that balance--the right information at the right time in the right tone--that it seems easier to give less rather than too much. Quirky narrative voices that work are a joy to read; those that fail are a slog to get through.
It's omni.
I'd have to look at the passage from PRINCE CASPIAN again to see if it includes some must-be-omni sentences. But just in general, I think it's useful to be able to distinguish different passages within a long omni work as being able to (out of omni context) 'pass' as various kinds of tight third, camera eye, group pv, etc etc.
I agree that tight third can, and often is, highly emotional (I'm speaking in general here, not of Lewis; I also agree that the Narnia books are omni). Even tight third that doesn't come out and state "he felt, she felt" can be highly emotional by showing us meaningful reactions that shout about the emotions held inside and make us feel them, too.
I tend not to read emotionally neutral books, but I'm guessing from the description that the camera-eye technique mentioned here deliberately avoids any shots that would reveal feelings; you have to assume them from the action.
Sometimes being spare like that works -- bare cherry tree branches against the sky, and all that. For me as a reader, though, it's rare that I feel fully satisfied.
Hmmm. I'm trying to play devil's advocate against myself and come up with something that seems emotionally neutral on the surface but which left me feeling satisfied by the story. This isn't the sort of story I was thinking of from the post, but "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" is arguably neutral. There is a narrator's voice felt, though, so perhaps it doesn't qualify.
Hammett understood the art of show don't tell, and showed the telling bits. He could make you feel without telling you what to be feeling.
Whereas, most of the modern thrillers I read (Daniel Silva is an exception, so is Elmore Leonard) just show what happens, and don't bother bringing the impact.
But...if the language written down while those buckets were flowing was banal and overstuffed with superlatives and cliches, the reader just isn't going to be equally moved.
It occurs to me that people avoid them for that reason, just as many writers avoid sex scenes. It's too easy to fall into either a euphemism trap or a superlative trap and come off wrong.
In terms of contemporary fiction though, it seems to me that two voice-types dominate.
One is first-person, which seems to occur in about half of the novels I pick up. The other is the third-person who, as you say, is no longer a person--a "narrator"--at all. Rather it seems this voice is a floating lens that focuses on telling the story from one character's point of view and then another's. This, as you say, allows for info-dumps with emotional resonance, as the reader gets the info when the character does and feels the character's feelings about it. What this does not allow is a sense of stepping back and seeing the bigger picture, the "omnisicient perspective" that allows the kind of sweeping overview that we see in long, establishing shots in movies. I kind of like this kind of "epic" perspective, but don't see it much in contemporary fiction.
Though with the rise in popularity of Patrick O'Brian, etc, maybe that is changing.
There are many voices a story can have; but for me, if there's no voice, there's no point in reading on. Plot alone has never done it for me. And I'm not sure you can get character without voice.
I've gotten over that as I gradually read a wider range of materials. This hasn't translated to everything though. I still have trouble if the author interrupts the story (unless this is the Princess Bride). I also can't handle narrators in most movies. Occasional voiceovers from a narrator are okay, but ones that interrupt all the time are horrid.
I've never found Lovecraft to do this, perhaps because of coming to him in a context with the various cultural trickle-out of the Cthulhu muythos and the thousand and one less nightmarish contexts in which it gets referenced already familiar to me; perhaps also because there are things about his prose style that just do not work for me.
If I understand what Lovecraft was actually aiming for, the closest I can think of to actually making that sense of creeping inexorable unease as a fundamental universal principle work is in some of Caitlin Kiernan's novels. Inpressive porse and characterisation and sens of place, and a haunting sense of Deep Time informed by thorough palaeontological knowledge. Probably not your thing, but worth noting anyway.
Lots of interesting food for thought here, and I generally agree with what you have to say (particularly that neat summation in the final sentence). The issue of info-dumping has also been in my head lately, because I've been reading more SF than usual (I'm usually reading horror novels but decided to give SF a try).
Anyway. I remember reading a bunch of current novels that followed the same trend.
Curious: What were those current novels you read that took on a detached kind of narrative voice?