Unpleasant Characters

by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

I'm currently reading The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, an Australian book that provoked quite a bit of controversy a couple of years ago, not surprisingly, as it centers around someone slapping another person's child at a backyard BBQ. Although I find the issues it raises about Australian culture and parenting interesting, I have nearly thrown the book in the bin (and seriously, I'm not sure I even want to bother reading the rest of the book) because of the repellent nature of the characters. 


What makes this strange, for me at least, is that it is the very unpleasantness of these characters that has made the story less rather than more compelling. This is in complete contrast to the previous two books I have read - The Ghost Road by Pat Barker (about shell shocked WW1 soldiers including the poet Wilfred Owen and a character, Billy Prior, who is unsympathetic for most of the book) and A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin - which has a number of pretty unlikeable characters. 


So what makes an unsympathetic character nonetheless compelling? Why is it that in some books, you might dislike, even loathe, a character, but still find the book intriguing - while in others, that same visceral reaction makes you want to hurl the book at the nearest wall and be done with it? 


Although I am not the sort of writer who subscribes to the notion that you have to have a sympathetic main character, I do believe that there must be some redeeming feature, flaw or level of humour that ensures a reader isn't alienated by an unlikeable character. In the case of The Slap I've found some characters so distasteful that I simply don't want to spend any more time inside their heads. In the case of the other books (which are as unlike each other as it is possible - one, historical the other total fantasy) the world and the characters that inhabited it were flawed but intriguing. They hadn't crossed the line to become either dull or intolerable. 


But how, when you are writing a novel, do you avoid falling into this trap? None of us want to read books about one-dimensional goodies or baddies, but neither do we want to hang-out with boring or repellent three-dimensional characters either.


This got me thinking about how to write 'unpleasant' characters, knowing of course, that there are no rules - only pitfalls to avoid. For me, these include alienating a reader, failing to provide any redeeming feature for a character, or 'telling' the reader to such an extent that the reader does not believes the character to be realistic. For me (and I am in the minority as most reviewers loved The Slap) the characters themselves impeded the story. I didn't want to delve into their minds, not because it was an unpleasant place to be, but because it was unpleasant to the point of being dull. It turned me off what I might otherwise have been interested in reading. I had no sympathy. I had no compelling reason to find out what happened to them.


So how do you think writers should tackle the subject of unpleasant and unsympathetic characters? Who do you think does this successfully and why? 


In many ways, tone can be as important as characterization. In Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, the protagonist is likeable because of the humor brought to his predicament as well as the tone of the book. Perhaps in The Slap I simply didn't like the 'voice' brought to bear for the characters - too strident, too boorish, to misogynistic perhaps. That probably says as much about me as it does about the book...but still how do you feel about reading books about characters you find morally (or otherwise) repugnant?