Interesting Characters

For me it all began in 1975 with Nicholas Meyer and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. I had just read all of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books and was looking for more about the aloof and effete but brilliant fellow. Holmes has the interesting distinction of being a literary character entirely created by one author, Arthur Conan Doyle, who has had more books written about him by others than were originally written by his creator.

So, anyhow, what fiction writer needs to invent characters when there are ready-made characters waiting for them? In The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Meyers also makes use of another interesting character, Sigmund Freud. If you haven’t read the book, you should. Later Meyer created The West End Horror in which Holmes met up with George Bernard Shaw, actress Ellen Terry, and the actor and later writer Bram Stoker.

These were my introduction to a genre of fiction that has never lost its appeal for me, alternative history. The author, if he is genuinely clever, develops intriguing characters from historical characters, puts them down in a well-developed setting and builds a plot around them which is fully in keeping with the period and the characters. Reality and fiction blend seamlessly when it is done well – as it does in life.

One of the best books of this sort that I ever read was Paul J. McAuley’s Pasquale’s Angel, a thriller set in the Renaissance with “performances” by Leonardo daVinci, Michelangelo, Raphael (around whose mysterious death the plot turns) and a snoopy, Columbo-like detective named Niccolo Machiavelli. It’s a fun read.

The thing about alternative history is it can be very good or very bad depending on the skill of the writer. At its worst the historical figures seem to have been plucked, unformed, from a textbook and plopped down in the story, presumably to fend for themselves, based solely on the familiarity of their names. However, when done well, the characters sparkle and come alive in a way they never did in history books - at least not the ones I read - but more than that they give a genuine appreciation of the times in which they did whatever they did. Caleb Carr does a wonderful job of this in his Dr. Lazlo Kreizler mysteries with the tough but progressive New York City police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt.

I recently finished Matthew Pearl’s delightful The Dante Club, set in nearby Cambridge, which pits a villain perpetrating copycat murders using the punishments described in Dante’s Divine Comedy against three formidable sleuths James Russell Lowell, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I have to tell you, I loved every single paragraph. I am familiar with all those names from grade school and I have spent many hours in Cambridge but neither the city nor the characters ever seemed as interesting to me as they did in Pearl’s delicious book.

I haven’t been particularly impressed with some of the recent novels about artists – Tracy Chevalier’s The Girl with the Pearl Earring, Susan Vreeland’s The Passion of Artemisia and Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus seemed dry and lifeless and, frankly, I didn’t much care for the characters. Maybe it is the sense of playfulness, and of course the mysteries, in the other books I loved.

Yesterday at the library I picked up Passion by Jude Morgan, a novel about Byron, Shelley and Keats. I haven’t started it but I am hopeful it will be good. I guess I figure if you are going to swipe your characters from history, you should do a good job of making them interesting. Just because a character was once a real person doesn’t give them an excuse to be dull.

Thanks for reading.