Getting into character

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  Allan Massie

  Getting into character

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

Severe critics, of the sort who style themselves post-modernist, or at least attract that label, go much further in their puritan disdain. They deny the existence of characters in fiction. The author may give his personages names and descriptions, but the critic will have none of it. Speaking of one who figures in a Henry James novel, William Gass says, ‘He is not an object of perception, and nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be said of him.’ This is vigorous, but manifest nonsense.

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly 21 years in the world, with very little to distress or vex her.

‘Handsome, clever, and rich’ are all words that may appropriately be applied to persons, and, when Jane Austen chooses to  apply them to her heroine, she immediately fixes an idea of Emma in the reader’s mind. It is true that this is merely a static description, no more vivid than the response we might give in real life to the question ‘what’s he like?’ ‘Nice enough, but a bit pleased with himself.’ It is only when we hear Emma speak and see her in action that she enters, and may enliven, our imagination.

In general indeed, static descriptions are a waste of effort on the author’s part, for they do little to bring a character to life. ‘The manager is a fattish man with horn-rimmed spectacles and false teeth, clean-shaven, with a bronzed, squarish face.’ That says a little, but not much. ‘He has a way of interspersing his conversation with fragments of bad French’. That’s better; we begin to get a sense of the man.  

E. M. Forster floated the idea of round characters and flat characters, the former capable of development and therefore more interesting — superior creations even — the latter always the same. I’m not sure it’s a helpful distinction, if only because the flat character may have more vitality than the round one, and will accordingly be more vivid and more memorable. In truth, in real life we probably see most of our acquaintances as flat characters. I used to know an alcoholic publican called Arthur. At some point in the evening he would shout ‘In Town Tonight!’ — catchphrase (I think) of some radio comedian. Later he would call out to his wife, ‘I’m not going to sleep with you tonight, Dolly’. (‘Too right, you’re not,’ she would mutter.) Both must have had an inner life that a novelist might have made something of, but, as flat characters playing the same role night after night, they live more clearly in my memory after 40 years than many people I have known much better, with whom I perhaps engaged in long discussions about conduct and the meaning of life.

Vitality is what the novelist aims at. Compare Anthony Blanche and Julia Flyte in Brideshead. Anthony leaps off the page; he never surprises, but always delights. There is no suggestion of development; he is a flat character, but continuously interesting, his critical demolition of Charles’s South American paintings with their ‘sumptuous greenery’ one of the best things in the novel. In contrast Waugh strained to bring Julia alive as a round character capable of development, and failed. Except for the first time we meet her, when she drives Charles from the station to Brideshead and he catches, ‘a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me’, as he lights a cigarette for her and puts it in her mouth, she is, poor girl, dead as mutton. We can describe her, of course, but statically, and, though Waugh works hard to show her development, it does not convince. In contrast the half-page he devotes to ‘bland, bun-faced’ Father Phipps brings the little priest before us, for he reveals himself in speech as poor Julia, for all the words given to her, never really does.