Flipping through Joseph Conrad's 1896 novel An Outcast of the Islands
I came across this passage:
"Consciously or unconsciously, men are proud of their firmness, steadfastness of purpose, directness of aim. They go straight towards their desire, to the accomplishment of virtue - sometimes of crime - in an uplifting persuasion of their firmness. They walk the road of life, the road fenced in by their tastes prejudices, disdains or enthusiasms, generally honest, invariably stupid, and are proud of never losing their way. If they do stop, it is to look for a moment over the hedges that make them safe, to look at the misty valleys, at the distant peaks, at cliffs and morasses, at the dark forests and the hazy plains where other human beings grope their days painfully away, stumbling over the bones of the wise, over the unburied remains of their predecessors who died alone, in the gloom or in sunshine, halfway from anywhere. The man of purpose does not understand, and goes on, full of contempt. He never loses his way. He knows where he is going and what he wants. Travelling on, he achieves great length without any breadth, and battered, besmirched, and weary, he touches the goal at last; he grasps the reward of his perseverance, of his virtue, of his healthy optimism: an untruthful tombstone over a dark and soon forgotten grave."
He's talking about Tom Lingard, who appears in a few of Conrad's novels and comes to reveal himself as something of a benevolent despot. Conrad is brilliant at portraying the anti-hero in a way that illuminates the trials of the human spirit, so that the reader becomes engrossed in why his characters behave the way they do and, whether they choose to like them or not, can empathise to some extent with their motivations and the choices they make.
In any book, the characters that stand out to me are the ones you can pick apart and dissect and debate, because the writer has created such a fullness to them (even in their limitations, of which Lingard has many) that they could exist as real people, and because they highlight aspects of the human experience that resonate with people regardless of the time or place of reading.
I'm constantly thinking about character development because it's so critical to authenticity... Which characters resonate with you? And what is it about them that makes them stay with you after you finish reading a novel...?
Pictured above, Joseph Conrad's plaque on the NSW Writers Walk in Sydney. He visited Australia twice in the late 1800s in his job as First Mate on the merchant ship Torrens. (Click image to enlarge.)
The question I'm grappling with is: What makes a character resonate with the reader so that the reader cares about what happens to them?
If you don't care what happens to the characters the story is pretty much dead in the water, no matter how promising the plot.
As I develop my characters in Africa, surrounded by old and inspiring friends who may well, unbeknownst to them, lend their own attributes to my fictional friends, I'm thinking about characters in fiction that have moved me. Either to adore them to the point where I haven't wanted to finish the book because to remain present in their literary lives is far better than to feel bereft in their absence. Or to react to a character with such disdain that the book is flung impatiently aside and abandoned.
In my childhood, Anne (of Green Gables) was prissy and boring. Fling.
Pippi Longstocking, on the other hand, captured my imagination with her stripey tights and her pluck, dashing off on endless adventures with her motley crew of mates, orange plaits agape in her wake.
In high school, inspired by the heroine Tess (she of the D'Urbervilles), it frustrated me no end that Thomas Hardy should pair such a treasure with the limp, insipid, gormless Angel. Pfft.
The only reason I watched the entire movie Alfie (the Jude Law remake) was because I was trapped on an aeroplane with a TV screen two inches from my nose and couldn't walk out or turn it off. His title character was vile. He started out as an arrogant arse, played with peoples' emotions, flung them recklessly aside until they were fractured shadows of their former selves, then went on to have a miserable life. End of story. Huh? What's the point?
If the characters have no substance, there's no reason for the reader to empathise with them or become emotionally engaged.
Some of my all-time favourites from fiction whose appeal I'm contemplating are:
- Atticus Finch and Scout La Rue, To Kill A Mockingbird
- Troubled but gutsy Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye
- The cast of country characters island-bound during WWII in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
- Grotesque and depraved but strangely sensitive and fragile, Grenouille, from Perfume
- All time gun-slinging, quick-drawing Annie Oakley, the wildest cowgirl in the West, who burst into the testosterone world of cowboys and Indians, matching them on her horse and confounding them with her femine wiles and sweet-girl glamour
How to pinpoint the X-factor in characters that reel us in and keep us turning pages? Keeping them real enough to be credible, admirable enough to raise our expectations but whose failings don't repulse us to the point of rejection.
I'd love to know what you think. Who are the characters that have stuck in your heart and mind, and why?
