13 Ways to Engage Your Reader with a Despicable Character
By Kathryn Craft | April 12, 2018 |
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
I’m not one who believes that character likability is key to winning over the reader—for me, “relatability” is more important—but there is a character in David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (long-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize) whose lack of moral compass challenges even my liberal stance.
After a night out with his college friends, Hugo has sex with the woman that Olly (his friend and the designated driver, no less) has admitted he’s in love with. Later, he hides near a phone booth and listens, amused, to Olly’s private despair as he begs for the return of her love. He’s slept with the mother of another of those friends and when with him, thinks about her naked. He tells a regular bedmate, a Brazilian nurse, that he’ll never introduce her to his parents because they don’t have that kind of relationship, and wonders “why women are uglier once they’re unpeeled, encrusted, and had.”
He steals and sells the valuable stamp collection of a former mentor suffering from Alzheimer’s and banks the money under an assumed name. He regularly fleeces another friend at cards, assuming his rich family will refill his coffers, resulting in such debt that the friend drives his last precious asset, a mint condition 1969 Aston Martin, over a cliff to end his shameful existence. Hugo’s reaction to hearing the news, after disbelief, is about the car: “I could weep. All that money.”
This character is a reprobate. What does it say about me that I cared about his story journey? Don’t judge me…yet. Suspecting mad skills, I had to go back and figure out how Mitchell won my interest.
1. First, there’s the character’s name: Hugo Lamb. Seriously—a huge lamb? Subliminally, the author is promising that the character has soft parts.
2. Hugo appreciates, in great detail, the work of 20th-century British classical composer Benjamin Britten.
3. He is entertaining. When he sees a beautiful woman in church:
The Kraken in my boxer shorts awakes.
4. His intelligence is on display during a long, off-the-cuff argument on the nature of power.
5. When it suits him, he’s loyal and protective. An undergrad in politics, he poses as a postgrad law student to warn off aggressors that threaten his group of friends.
6. The reason he knows about the brigadier’s stamp collection is because he visits him regularly in the nursing home to read to him.
7. Someone appreciates Hugo for who he is. At one point, Olly’s “girlfriend” tells Hugo:
“The problem with the Ollies of the world is their niceness. Niceness drives me mental.”
…
You, Hugo,” she kisses my earlobe, “are a sordid, low-budget French film. The sort you’d stumble across on TV at night. You know you’ll regret it in the morning, but you keep watching anyway.”
8. He is self-aware:
I get up and go out through the back door. The cold air shocks my skin as I go, “Shoo, shoo!” to the cat. The feline hunter leaps onto the garden shed. It watches me. Its tail sashays. The mangled bird is twitching in the black cat’s mouth.
I hear the boomy scrape of an airplane.
A twig snaps. I am intensely alive.
~and later, with the Brazilian nurse~
Tell her it’s over, Hugo the Wise advises, but Hugo the Horny loves a uniform.
9. He exposes his existential angst:
The brigadier I knew has left his bombed-out face, leaving me alone with the clock, shelves of handsome books nobody ever reads, and one certainty: that whatever I do with my life, however much power, wealth, experience, knowledge, or beauty I’ll accrue, I, too, will end up like this vulnerable old man. When I look at Brigadier Reginald Philby, I’m looking down time’s telescope at myself.
10. He can be generous. He knows how to perfectly gift-wrap a box and helps a stranger who is fumbling at the task. He gives two twenties to a homeless man so he can afford to stay in a hostel. He offers his coat to his dad, worried about him running a quick errand in the cold.
10. He has his own standards. He refuses to join in with his friends who unknowingly pick up prostitutes, and when their pimp shows up the next morning, leaves them (taking along the money he’s won off them) to face the consequences of their naïveté.
11. Logical and decisive, Hugo talks himself through the novel’s more fantastical situations:
Weird shit needs theories and I have three.
12. Hugo’s arc centers on pragmatism and love:
He wonders what real love might be like.
Olly’s laugh is a notch too loud. His pupils have morphed into love-hearts and, for the nth time squared, I wonder what love feels like on the inside because externally it turns you into the King of Tit Mountain.
A periodic cocaine user on vacation in the Alps, Hugo waxes philosophic about love:
“Human beings,” I inhale my wine’s nutmeggy steam, “are walking bundles of cravings… Love is one way to satisfy some of those cravings. But love’s not just the drug; it’s also the dealer. Love wants love in return, am I right, Olly? Like drugs, the high looks divine, and I envy the users. But when the side effects kick in—jealousy, the rages, grief—I think, count me out. Elizabethans equated love with insanity. Buddhists view it as a brat throwing a tantrum at the picnic of the calm mind.”
He falls for an otherwise unremarkable “skinny” woman named Holly who taught herself French, can ski gracefully, and can handle herself while serving a barroom full of men. She exhibits no particular interest in him. He questions himself as he watches her wrap his sprained ankle:
This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator. I know this, yet the blast furnace in my ribcage roars You You You You You just the same, and there’s bugger-all I can do about it. “It’s not too tight?” asks Holly.
“It feels perfect,” I tell her.
Against his own patterns of easy acquisition, he follows her around to prove his interest until they finally sleep together, when he thinks:
“…love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and absence is the difference between life and death. Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you to Holly, who breathes like the sea. This time I whisper it, at about the violin’s volume: “I love you.” No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.”
Despite his feelings, the accumulation of Hugo’s sins makes him feel a relationship with Holly is unworkable. I felt the loss. Do you blame me, after the way he spoke of love? Instead, Mitchell’s mind-bendy tale has Hugo accepting a Faustian deal that promises him eternal life. Perhaps his true nature had spoken, because it seems he’s okay with the part that requires him to kill others to provide him with the “black wine” that will keep him alive.
Yet. Decades later, Hugo, who still looks twenty-five, meets up with normally aging Holly again when her life is in peril and—hmm, what happens? In order not to spoil everything for those of you willing to undertake the more than 600 pages of this novel, I’ll simply say that Hugo is still wondering if Holly had ever loved him.
Do you have a character your critique partners have found unlikable? Do you see any techniques here you might use to sway them? What other techniques have you noticed that have made you intrigued by an amoral character?
[coffee]
Kathryn Craft (she/her) is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her forthcoming book, Crafting Story Movement: Techniques to Engage Readers and Drive Your Novel Forward, draws from decades of experience as both a story consultant and a movement specialist/dance critic. Learn more on Kathryn’s website.
Another great share of your Mad Skills, Kathryn! When you first introduced Hugo, I found him reprehensible (the theft of the stamps, among the other things), but by the end of your essay, I really wanted to check out this book and learn more about him. If you could do that in the small space allotted for this article, then these tips must have a bit of meat on them. Thanks!
It’s funny how different things will disgust different readers. We all draw lines in different places. The old man was his mentor, so that was indeed horrible. But for some reason I thought it was even worse that he slept with his friend’s lover and then listened in on his desperate please to get her back. Oh Hugo—you have a way to repulse everyone.
Oh, they were all bad. I guess the abuse of his mentor’s trust, especially since he suffered from Alzheimer’s, got me right off the bat (it was your first example). They really need someone trustworthy.
You got me, Kathryn. I’ve enjoyed smart and wicked characters. They are deeply flawed but oh so entertaining. I’ve only known a couple of people like this in my life and they happen to be good friends–underneath the wisecracks and heartlessness is a big lamb (I loved the name and its allusions). I have a couple of minor characters in my novels like these and my critique partners have loved them but I don’t know if I have the mad skills to pull off a MC like this. Give me another decade or two :)
My husband’s book group has been reading Flannery O’Connor so I’ve been revisiting her stories as well. Most of her characters are awful, but funny, and you can see yourself in them–your very faults magnified–and you see too, that grace still abounds. I think that’s the key, showing those moments of grace.
Thanks for sharing your mad skills. I should dissect some of my unexpectedly favorite novels, like Lolita.
Yes Vijaya, I think you’ve hit it on the head—such characters are entertaining. You don’t even need a big plot twist to get the reader to drop his jaw, because the behavior alone does the trick! Mitchell constructs this story through POV characters that represent different ways that the world he’s created exists. As Scotland Yard and those he loves close in, Hugo sees nothing good will come of staying in this realm. You’d think I would have liked his character Crispin Hershey better, as he’s an author, but I found him a bore in comparison!
This is wonderful, Kathryn. I think your choice of such an extreme example gives us many different techniques to learn from. My villain’s reprehensibility is different from Hugo Lamb’s. Long ago I had my character change his name to one that would be immediately appealing and reassuring; how nice to have that echoed here. Along with the name change, for some time I have been wondering how to make him more sympathetic. This will give me some good guidance. However, I just don’t have it in me to make him as awful as Hugo Lamb (nor does he).
Anna I love that slight promise that can be delivered in a name. Like, “Hang in there with this character, it will be worth it.” This is why in my second novel, THE FAR END OF HAPPY, I named the husband at the heart of the suicide standoff “Jeffrey Farnham.” I wanted him to have an all-American type name so that, despite his many mistakes, he wouldn’t be demonized.
Kathryn,
I’ve been a Mitchell fangirl since ‘Black Swan Green’, in which he made me feel empathy with a sullen adolescent, no small feat while I had one of my own. So by the time I read ‘The Bone Clocks’, I trusted him to deliver the goods. Your choice of this novel and the quotes you chose make me want to go back and read it again. They show us Hugo’s seemingly-dissonant dimensions. Mitchell is scary brilliant at doing this. Every word contributes the whole. Nothing wasted. I have a character who was deemed ‘unlikable’ some years back by several (most!) members of my critique group. The character has since undergone an enormous re-working. But after reading your post today, I think my fellow writers were really telling me that the character was simply un-relatable. Thanks for another great post.
Hi Susan, did you know Hugo first appeared in Black Swan Green? From Wikipedia (and my son, who says Mitchell’s characters often appear in various novels): “Hugo Lamb, one of the novel’s narrators, appears as a boy in Black Swan Green, in which he is the protagonist Jason Taylor’s cousin.” Do you remember anything about young Hugo?
I don’t! But from reading his other books, I know that he does this. Now I’ll have to go back and read BSG again. He has truly created a world, albeit a strange one. What a cool way to world-build.:)
Kathryn, this is fabulous and is making me think, but I fear this is far above my pay grade at this point. :-) Still, it will stay in mind I hope to apply it some day.
Awesome! You know where to find it when you need it. ;)
As usual your mad skills inform, teach and pique interest. There are many great novels whose not-to-be-loved characters support the plot, make turning the pages worthwhile. We live in a world of dualities and the good or acceptable things that one character does have to bump up against those that don’t register that way. A character who isn’t totally residing on the side of evil but has the bright spots you mention, make the reader wonder how changer will occur and if the scales will be tipped in one direction or the other.
Thanks for this feedback, Beth. Poor Hugo—dare I say, a sacrificial Lamb?—was needed to establish how this evil sect was able to gain traction. I found him one of the more interesting characters in the book. although Marinus, one of the good guys, was equally good. It just occurred to me: the evil characters were immortal, but the good characters had to be reborn again and again to fight another day. Intended or not, a kind of cool message.
Hi, Kathryn:
I just turned in a piece to Writer’s Digest on the reprehensible but fascinating character, and I’ve been warned not to steal my own thunder by repeating myself here (they actually check online to see if I’m plagiarizing myself). But many of the techniques you list — insight, a connection to another, a lust for life, humor — are crucial to creating empathy for such a character.
I also believe that the whiplash nature of the contradictions — predatory self-interest combined with clearly compassionate insight and demonstrable kindness — make the reader sit up and wonder: What connective tissue can hold such opposites together?
Wonderful post. Thanks so much.
Dear Writer’s Digest: David just gave us a GREAT TEASER! Can’t wait to read your piece, David!