Omniscient narrator, unreliable narrator - breaking the rules

Over Christmas I read Adrian Tchaikovsky's SF masterpiece Children of Time.  The story is told in several viewpoints, most of them human. But one is the viewpoint of a spider. Yes, you read that right.    This spider isn't your average house spider, though.  It's far bigger, and far more intelligent.  

We're often drawn to a book because it gives us a different view of the universe.  Usually we expect to see the universe through the eyes and mind of the main character.  But how can we know the mind of a spider?  The author has the added challenge of needing to tell the reader information that the spiders couldn't possibly know.

He's solved this challenge by writing about the spiders in an omniscient viewpoint, but that viewpoint almost dips down into close third person in places, when he gives us the thoughts of individual spiders. He also skilfully weaves dialogue through the piece, actual spider conversations.

That all sounds like a recipe for disaster, the sort of thing a new author does without knowing they're doing it.  And in the hands of an inexperienced author it would be a disaster.  But not here.  In this author's hands it works brilliantly.

He also makes use of a very unusual form of unreliable narrator.  We usually expect an unreliable narrator to be an individual who has a wrong understanding of the situation, or one who is deliberately misinforming the reader.  In this book the unreliable narrator is, in effect, every human character. I don't want to go into details as it would give away the end of the book, so I'll resort to being vague here.  The humans see events within the framework of invasion and war.  But the so-called invasion is to achieve a different, unexpected, purpose.  It's not for conquest at all.

Adrian Tchaikovsky breaks all the rules with this narrative.  But he illustrates that, in the right circumstances, the rules are there to be broken.  And if you want to put forward a spider's viewpoint, you probably have no choice but to break them.

The breadth and audacity of the story and the way it is told left me feeling elated, and wondering how I could do the same with one of my novels.  Oh, wait, I already did, with Genehunter.  There I have talking, technology-using big cats.  With hands.  Maybe now is the time to pitch that book again.