No More Mr Nice Guy
© Wise Wander
Miles Cain, York-based writer, storyteller and musician, considers the prevalence of less-than-lovely characters populating modern and classic fiction.
Earlier this year, I listened to novelist Zoë Heller give an interesting interview on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Woman’s Hour’.
Heller, who recently published her third novel The Believers, was talking about the inclusion of difficult characters in her narratives. The interview focused on difficult female characters in Heller’s books, for example Audrey, the Jewish matriarch in The Believers and Barbara in the excellent Notes on a Scandal, which was later made into a film starring Judi Dench as the lonely and manipulative narrator.
Why do bad people make for good fiction?
Heller said that she often goes to book clubs where readers tell her that they want to read about ‘nice’ characters. She went on to say that “part of literature’s function is to introduce the reader to characters or situations that are alien, difficult, or unpleasant.”
It could be argued that the best fiction comes out of such things. Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory centres on a disturbed and violent individual. Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho deals with a man who is a killer (or fantasises about killing). The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger’s groundbreaking 1950s novel, is narrated by a lonely and disaffected teenager as he travels through New York.
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh deals with the world of heroin and addiction. Much of Michel Faber’s work deals with difficult themes, including a strong undercurrent of violence. The best novel I’ve read this year, Ian McEwan’s brilliant The Cement Garden, is a dark narrative about four children whose parents are buried in the family home. The plays of Harold Pinter contain a sinister underbelly as the characters play deft verbal power games with each other.
The dark classics
Although there’s plenty of this kind of thing in modern fiction, the seeds were sown with classic novels such as Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s highly influential dystopia of science and morality, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, which featured the ‘madwoman in the attic’, shut away by Mr Rochester.
This element of Bronte’s work made such an impression that it has echoed through novels in the 160 years since it was published, as in Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s ‘prequel’ to the Bronte novel. Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde explores man’s two sides - the polite side that is offered to society, and the side that is uncontrollable, carnal and violent. This idea would later become a theme of J G Ballard’s nightmarish visions in books like Crash and Kingdom Come.
For some people, the inclusion of dark and difficult characters is too much. It’s too unsettling to be confronted with stories that dwell on the more unsavoury aspects of human nature. The novels listed above are populated by nutters, psychopaths and unpleasant individuals. Yet human curiosity makes these characters hard for us to resist. Despite ourselves, we are drawn to them, like a child who wants to do something more than ever once they’re told it’s off-limits.
Why do oddballs intrigue us?
I find myself agreeing with Zoë Heller’s opinion on this matter, and these days I seem to be increasingly writing from viewpoints of people who are a little odd, eccentric, or weird. What is the point of reading about people who are like you, who share your viewpoints, morals and politics? Surely it’s more arresting to read about characters who are one step removed from us.
Quite simply, oddballs make for intriguing characters who, providing they’re believeably written, can provide us with a fascinating worldview that opposes our own. Ultimately, we’ll get more from fiction if it broadens our visions and understanding of the world. Providing, of course, that we’re prepared to have our understanding stretched.
You can email Miles at milesinyork@hotmail.com
For more on Miles visit www.milescain.com and www.wordswordswords.co.uk
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