On infodumps

One of my biggest pet peeves is when authors clutter their work with excessive background information.  Few things irritate me more than having the flow of a story broken so the narrator can regale me with a mini-lecture on Egyptian temple decoration, the lineage of the High Elf Lords of Fantasia Minor, or the sewer system of Paris.  Even if I’m actually interested in the subject material, I resent having it dumped on me in that fashion.

Part of the problem is that these infodumps are almost always done by the narrator.  For me, narrators work best when they’re unobtrusive and it’s hard for them to be unobtrusive when they’re yammering on about  beekeeping in the Roman Empire.  Some writers try to avoid this by putting their infodumps in the mouths of their characters, but that gets dangerously close to “As you know, Bob…” territory.

Writers of historical fiction need to be especially wary of falling into this trap.  We do not have the luxury of writing in worlds that are readily understandable to our readers, so we’re always going to have to make more of an effort to set the scene properly.  But while it’s fine to spend some time explaining things that modern readers might not be familiar with, that doesn’t give us license to cram so many historical tidbits into our work that it looks like it was written by an 18th century antiquary.

Regular readers of my blog may wonder how I could enjoy Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell since it contained copious amounts of background information.  She could get away with it because she was deliberately imitating the style of 19th century authors.  As anyone who’s ever read Victor Hugo or Anthony Trollope will tell you, info dumps were all the rage back then.  Clarke also tended to confine her background information to footnotes, so if you didn’t want to read it, you could easily skip over it.

What do you think?  Do extensive background infodumps detract from a story, or do they make it richer?