Characters in novels

Characters are what fascinate me the most in a novel. They must belong to our own planet in the first place. Then they must be complex enough to be of some interest to me. Their problems must have some similarities, even if remote, with mine or other ordinary people’s. Their pursuits must belong to the same world that I inhabit. They must breathe the same air that I breathe even if the degree of pollution varies. They must have dreams and nightmares that kick at the ghosts within me.

I find it difficult to enjoy eminent contemporary writers like Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy [The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, I mean] because their characters belong to some other planet apparently. Rushdie’s latest protagonist, Quichotte, is “a travelling man of Indian origin, advancing years and retreating mental powers,” in love with TV shows. He devours “morning shows, daytime shows, late-night talk shows, soaps, situation comedies, Lifetime Movies, hospital dramas, police series, vampire and zombie serials, the dramas of housewives from Atlanta, New Jersey, Beverly Hills and New York, the romances and quarrels of hotel-fortune princesses and self-style shahs, the cavortings of individuals made famous by happy nudities, the fifteen minutes of fame accorded to young persons with large social media followings on account of their plastic-surgery acquisition of a third breast or their post-rib-removal figures that mimicked the impossible shape of the Mattel company’s Barbie doll…” That list is seemingly endless. And the whole thing, the entire novel, is very clever too.

I admit that the world has become too bizarre to have normal characters in fiction who can portray today’s life convincingly. But I have become outdated, I think, and hence I find those old characters more fascinating.

Ms Roy’s protagonist who lives “in the graveyard like a tree” is closer to my world and hence of more interest to me. The crows and bats with which the protagonist shares habitat are also familiar to me. I can understand the metaphorical graveyards in Roy’s novel: a graveyard in Delhi that is converted into the Jannat Guest House by the protagonist and the Jannat of Kashmir converted into a conglomerate of graveyards by Delhi. Very clever, again. But it is not cleverness that I look for in novels.

I prefer the ordinary mortals of the old novels. A student of mine brought her personal copy of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind when I told her I hadn’t read it nor watched the movie. While reading it, this thought about characterisation struck me. Mitchell is splendid at creating characters that enchant us. I love the way she presents her characters.

Here is Ellen O’Hara, for example. “She would have been a strikingly beautiful woman had there been any glow in her eyes, any responsive warmth in her smile or any spontaneity in her voice that fell with gentle melody on the ears of her family and her servants. She spoke in the soft slurring voice of the coastal Georgian, liquid of vowels, kind to consonants and with the barest trace of French accent. It was a voice never raised in command to a servant or reproof to a child but a voice that was obeyed instantly at Tara, where her husband’s blustering and roaring were quietly disregarded.” So real, so human, and, most importantly, so poetic.

I love conversations like this: “Love isn’t enough to make a successful marriage when two people are as different as we are. You would want all of a man, Scarlett, his body, his heart, his soul, his thoughts. And if you did not have them, you would be miserable. And I couldn’t give you all of me. I couldn’t give all of me to anyone. And I would not want all of your mind and your soul. And you would be hurt, and then you would come to hate me – how bitterly! You would hate the books I read and the music I loved, because they took me away from you even for a moment.”

Gone with the Wind is the story of that Scarlett whose love is as demanding as a god’s. What a character! And what a way to describe that character! Well, this is just a sample. I love every page of this book. I can’t say that about any novel of Rushdie that I have read. Nor the two novels of Roy. Or many other supereminent contemporary writers.

This is about my likes and choices, not about the merits and demerits of any of these writers. I know that I am not worthy to untie the shoelaces of these writers.