Recently I was reading a review of Sarah Waters new novel, The Night Watch, and one sentence got me thinking. The review said something like 'One of Sarah Waters' main talents as a writer, of which she has many, is her ability to create likeable characters.' I haven't read any of her novels so I can't say how true this is but, in a general way, what do you think of this as a writing ability? I'm not talking about powerful, memorable, strong or interesting characters although they may well be this as well, I mean likeable in the normal sense of the word, characters we would like to be friends with.

It seems to me that for many of the literary novels of recent years there are very few truly likeable characters. So is it desirable to create them or even possible in a conscious way? Any examples?

I mean likeable in the normal sense of the word, characters we would like to be friends with

I think I slightly differ here - because often a novelist can make me sympathise with, feel for and really like a character who in real life I'd probably never want to be friends with. For me the key thing is, how closely the narrative draws us in to the character's point of view. That can make the difference between a novel I admire - but the author keeps me at a distance from the characters - and one I really love, can hardly bear to put down.

Sarah Waters is terribly good at merging the boundaries between reader and character - although this didn't happen for me in The Night Watch so much as in Affinity (for instance). In The Night Watch, it's the backwards-told narrative that draws the reader inexorably in.


Frances

I think that like many of the more traditional and straightforward pleasures of fiction-reading - good stories, tasty writing, happy endings - having likeable characters is sometimes felt to be a bit un-cool, old-fashioned, starry-eyed, and certainly suspiciously un-literary, and commercial. Waters does seem to be one who's able to do traditional things in a way that slides them under the critics' guard, maybe because until The Night Watch she was writing Victorian pastiche, so it's acceptable to do Victorian things.

Jane Austen said that in Emma she was going to create a character whom nobody else would like, but of course we all do, flawed though she is - if Emma was a neighbour, I'd be very pleased to bump into her, but possibly laugh gently at her afterwards. Who each of us likes - of characters real and fictional - is always going to vary. Most people love Mrs Ramsay in To The Lighthouse, and the one or two people I know who regard her with horror are people with plenty of their own hangups about women and more particularly mothers. But dare I say that some of the writers least inclined to write likeable characters don't seem to be very likeable themselves?

I do wonder if likeableness always comes about partly by the writer's being engaged with them in some way as they would be with a real person. So much modern literary writing is deliberately cool and detached to the point (I too often find) of being airless and desiccated. Maybe some of the characters we don't find likeable in it we would, if the writer engaged with them as they would with a real person, instead of describing them.

I've been trying to read Graham Swift's Last Orders. Magnificent writing, beautiful structure, excellent premise, one character I quite care about, but I'm having real trouble remembering who's who - and that's a good third of the way into the book! There's something so disengaged about it, and not just because it's all very male. I'm guessing, but it's as if Swift has so absented himself from the picture - that he's so refusing to get close to them as people (as opposed to observing them in close focus, which he does beautifully) that because I'm wholly dependent what he gives me, I can't get close to them either.

I don't consciously set out to create likeable characters, but I don't think I could spend the years it takes to write a novel with people I didn't fundamentally like. One of things I've found hardest to take in the past is when someone says 'I just didn't like her,' - which is related to, though not the same as, the much more devastating and final, 'I didn't care about any of them.' I do think that like the other traditional pleasures of fiction, likeableness in characters is probably a golden commercial asset, however vulgar that might appear to be to the High Priests (and it is usually priests, not priestesses) of High Art.

Emma

<Added>

Frances, I think you and I are saying fundamentally the same thing, here (only you've managed to put in much more succintly than me - no change there, then!).

Perhaps one should see straightforward likeableness as a subset of the broader ways in which a writer can (or can't) make you care about the characters - and I'm sure you're right that it's a product of their own engagement (or lack of it). It's the not caring that's so disconcerting in modern lit. fic., and makes me not be able to be bothered to finish a book.

Emma, I think you've actually said it all much better than me!

Yes, there's a difference between 'do we care' (which is the absolutely vital question) and 'would I like this character if I met him/her in real life'. Some writers (Patricia Highsmith, Thomas Harris, Jeff Lindsay) are extremely (unnervingly) good at portraying likeable and charming serial murderers, so the reader can't help but root for them (and care a lot what happens to them). I'm fascinated by how easily my moral boundaries go out of the window. But this is something different from whether a character is objectively 'likeable' or not. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree here.

I've always felt that, since Emma is in fact very likeable indeed (and most of the time very sensitive to other people's feelings, with a couple of notable lapses), Jane Austen was being unnecessarily defensive.

F

Maybe it's one of those things where readers simply vary - and after all, we've all been charmed at a party by someone we wouldn't trust an inch in the rest of life. On the other hand, there was a good thread a while back on WW, by someone whose judgement of her own novel had been really thrown by a friend had refused to read it any further because the MC was in an adulterous relationship.

Maybe Austen was teasing the convention of the virtuous heroine in her remark. Or she was defensive because she knew she was letting the sharpness of the leash again that she'd partly suppressed in the likes of P&P in the interests of being published.

Emma

Frances, I agree completely that there are many characters that I may be very involved with but that's not the same as really liking them. For example I loved 'The Remains of the Day' and although I emphathised with Mr Stephens and cared deeply about his predicament, I can't say that I 'liked' him. And likeability has very little to do with character flaws or the lack of them. I really like Scarlett in 'Gone with the Wind' although it would be difficult to imagine a more obnoxious, flawed human being.

Emma, I am starting to think that maybe creating likeable characters is not something that anyone can set out to do. It's something you either do instinctively or not, a bit like humour. But I do think that another thing that likeable characters and humour have in common is that if a writer can do it, it is an immediate way of appealing to a broad audience. And if you can combine the two as in 'Bridget Jones' then it's going to be a huge commercial success. I read one of Alexander Smith McCall's books a few months ago and his Mma Ramotswe is very likeable and is, for me, the key to his success.

As for your suggestion that the basic likeability of characters stems from the extent to which the writers 'likes' people he/she interacts with in real life, it's a very interesting idea and if it's true then it does back up the notion that it's not something a writer has any control over.

I was devastated some months back when I showed a story to a relative who said my characters were "both fairly repulsive".

A colleague from my writing class (who I whinged to) then said, "Yes, but are they interesting?"

Obviously they were to me - or I wouldn't have written the story?

I think as a writer you have to engage with your characters - if you don't, how can the reader? Not that you'd necessarily want to go out to dinner with them or, in some cases, meet them up a dark alley?

Sarah

I think the key is being able to make someone identify with a character rather than making them 'likeable'. Sometimes, the reverse can happen - you can read a character you don't identify with at all, and that somehow makes them engaging.

Stephen Donaldson manages it in his Land story exceptionally well - most of his characters are flawed in some fundamental way (the MC is a rapist!) but you cannot help see them as ultimately human and thereby 'like' them.

JB

Sarah and JB, I agree entirely that a writer's aim should not be to create likeable characters, it's far more important that they be interesting and engaging, either in a postive or negative way. It can be much more interesting to get behind the motivations of people such as a serial killer, a 'bad' mother, a violent rapist etc who we (hopefully) don't normally frequent.

But what I wondered is: what is the impact on a novel when the character does happen to be likeable? From what I can see, it has a huge positive impact on sales although it might have an adverse effect on critical acclaim. Why? Maybe it's because a reader spends so much time with a book, a huge proportion of their spare time over days or weeks is spent in the company of the characters and, educational and enlightening as it might be to explore weirdos, outcasts of society or eccentrics, sometimes it's nice to spend that time in the company of people we like.

Emma, why do you think critics frown on likeable characters? After all it's a lot easier to create an interesting baddie than a likeable hero, likeablility being so hard to put your finger on? Is it because they appeal to the great unwashed?

Ashlinn

I'm not too clear on this word 'likeable'. In Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, the latter character is an uptight, miserable, tight-fisted sod, but I enjoyed him immensely. That, to my mind, renders him 'likeable' in a subjective sense, though if I met the miserly magician in real life I imagine I'd shudder with horror.

If a character is too one-dimensionally 'nice' I think it can only have a negative effect on the discerning reader. People generally aren't so easily defined as 'good', 'nice', 'evil' etc, and one should avoid stereotypes unless one is deliberately trying to use them and then generally they become archetypes. Because of that, I think my favourite characters have always been flawed, and therefore 'likeable' to me.

Perhaps that is just a reflection of my own imperfect character? I suppose we must all identify with different things as we are all different people. Paradoxically, that's also what makes us all the same.

JB

JB, In my last posting I said that likeability is not easy to put your finger on and certainly has nothing to do with being 'good' or 'nice'. In fact, I don't particularly like people who are too 'nice', I much prefer people with a wicked streak in them. But I do know when I really warm to a character in a book as opposed to finding them interesting even if I can't tell you exactly why. I'm talking about the emotional reaction to a character not the intellectual one. I don't have to like the character to enjoy or even love the book (the book I read most recently,'Sylvanus Now', which I loved is an example of that) but I do have a problem with reading a book if I strongly dislike the characters. For example I couldn't bear to read another Anita Brookner book because her characters are such self-pitying moaners.

Ashlinn

Emma, why do you think critics frown on likeable characters? After all it's a lot easier to create an interesting baddie than a likeable hero, likeablility being so hard to put your finger on? Is it because they appeal to the great unwashed?

I suspect in many cases it's the latter. Think what a dirty word 'accessible' has become.

Plus, review critics are journalists, and I think in journalism there's a tremendous pressure to agree that it's cooler to be cynical than trusting, write bad sex than good love, laugh at people than cry with them, espouse revolutionary politics than warm-hearted liberalism.

JB, I think 'likeable' is probably just one way a character can be enjoyable - there are lots of others. I think 'likeable' is probably the one who you'd also enjoy living next door to.

I have to say that I find creating baddies incredibly difficult. Maybe I'm just a soft-hearted, sheltered, soppy cow, but the best I can do is write real people who do bad things. And I must admit, as I writer I find it more interesting when people do bad things with the best intentions, or only subconsciously with bad ones, than in out-and-out villainy. Mind you I'll be meeting Richard III any week now, mind you, so that's going to be interesting...

Emma

Ashlinn

Yes, I'm reading you, just speculating out loud myself. Agreed, it is tricky. I gave up on Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black recently as I found the characters a little too 'bleak' for my taste. I suppose it's all down to taste, but I felt a bit claustrophobic sharing my head space with them and the book itself started to make me feel 'dirty'. I think it was supposed to, but eventually, half way through, I was completely repulsed. Odd thing is, I kind of admire Mantel for being able to do that - she is a good writer.

JB

Yes, I picked up Beyond Black in the bookshop because I, too admire her very much, but it was too much for me - there's only so far wonderful writing can compensate for unrelieved horribleness.

Emma

Aha, JB - I was just thinking about Beyond Black, in this very context. Because I read a review, can't remember where, that said the main characters weren't likeable. I was surprised, because I found Alison, the medium, very likeable indeed - and even Colette, though she's so consistently negative and nasty to Alison. I suspect readers of Beyond Black might be split about 50:50 between those who find the characters likeable and those who don't. Perhaps because Mantel's able to create very true-to-life characters - and in real life, we like some people and make friends with them, while disliking or feeling indifferent to others, according to who we are ourselves.

F

<Added>

Emma, it's not all horrible - the ending is lovely, with two gorgeous old-lady ghosts.