All characters in this publication are entirely fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

And it’s nearly always a lie. Robert Liddell suggests that the passage deceives nobody and would be no protection in a libel action, and, he continues, one must suppose that the common explanation is the true one: ‘it is inserted by publishers so that illiterate booksellers’ assistants may more easily be able to distinguish fiction from biography, memoirs and the like.’

To muddy the waters even further, in recent years some people have declared that they are willing to pay to be written into this or that popular writers’ novels. And some writers have agreed to do this, accepting money for their favourite charity as payment. It seems that some among us are not satisfied by having both a ‘real’ life and a virtual life on the world-wide-web, but are thirsty for more and looking for further identity in some kind of fictional existence.

I suppose these people must recognize that life and art are quite different things, and that existence in one is strangely different to existence in the other? E.M. Forster in Aspect of the Novel, points out how free fictional characters are from work, and what a disproportionate amount of time they devote to love.

I can’t help recalling the words of Guy de Maupassant, when talking about fictional character:

. . . whether we are describing a king, an assasin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stall-holder in the market, it is always ourselves that we are describing, for we are obliged to ask ourselves the following question: ‘If I was a king, an assassin, a thief, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, a stall-holder, what would I do, what would I think, how would I behave.’

Character, in any sense in which we can get it, is action, and action is plot. Henry James.

I have written about this question before in various posts (use the search tool at the top of the page to find them).

But I thought the story of how George Eliot came across and developed the story of Adam Bede, might be instructive.

The story was suggested by an event in the life of Eliot’s aunt, Mrs Evans, a Methodist preacher. Mrs Evens had spent a night in prison with a convicted child-murderer, a mere girl. Evans had sought to make the girl recognize her guilt, and had then accompanied her to the hangman.

George Lewes, with whom Eliot lived in an open-marriage, suggested that the night in prison would make a good scene in a novel – and Adam Bede was conceived with that scene as its centerpiece.

Eliot created a seducer – obviously necessary to the plot – who was a young officer, heir to the local squire. But as well as her seducer, the girl, Hetty, is blessed with a true lover of her own class; Adam Bede.

George Lewes suggested that the novel should end with Adam’s marriage to the woman preacher, and that there should be a clash of some kind between Adam Bede and the young officer.

Leslie Stephen tells how, while she was listening to Wilhelm Tell at the Munich opera, George Eliot was inspired to make the two rivals fight.

The aunt’s story is softened considerably, in that Hetty is not guilty of murder, but only of temporary desertion of her baby. And neither is Hetty hanged, but instead transported to Botany Bay.

I find it both amusing and instructive to have the ability to follow the mind of a great novelist and to glimpse how different people and influences impinge on the development of her story.

The five characters approached me, a little diffidently to be sure but also with a certain purpose. The wild child, naked, seated himself at my table, the chair opposite, while the others kicked their heels a little way off, one or two looking our way, the others taking in the protesters and pretending not to be interested in me at all.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked the wild child. ‘I don’t want to be bothered with it just now.’

‘You may not, but I need to have this out with you.’

‘You can’t speak,’ I told him. ‘You don’t have language.’ He’d been adopted by a set of badgers when he was a baby and raised on a dell near Scotch Corner, a couple of miles from the A1. He was ten years old, thereabouts, maybe as much as twelve, but to all intents and purposes still a child. Large hands and a short neck and fully developed genitalia were his allotted features. Had we been in Tehrān or Kabul he would have been arrested and stoned or whipped for his nakedness. But we were in York, England, an outpost of liberty and sexual enlightenment and it was more likely that it would be me who was arrested for my association with a ten year old naked child in the centre of the city.
‘Language?’ he said. ‘This is one of the problems. I’m not happy with the way I’m being drawn. None of us are. The colonel’s wife wants to be more than a sex object.’

‘Your happiness is not part of the equation.’

‘That is obvious.’

‘And why should it be? I need you to illustrate something in other, major characters. You are a cipher.’

‘With no potential?’

‘None.’

‘You arrogant bastard.’

‘Listen. I’m in charge. It’s my novel. I draw characters how I like. I think about what is needed and I add a character here or there, whenever needed. It’s up to me. I’m concerned with a developing narrative, if every character had a say the thing would spiral out of control. It’d be like real life.’

‘I’m not every character and in any case I’m undervalued more than many of the others. A wild child, indeed. I don’t even have a proper name.’

‘I’ll give you a name. But please go away now. I want to enjoy my coffee.’

‘I’m not going away. I just got here. I want answers.’

I tried to ignore him but he was not about to give up.

‘I’m not leaving.’

‘I’ll answer three questions,’ I said. ‘Then we’re finished.’ I liked that, giving him three questions. Three times more than he expected. Deep within me the tide turned.

‘OK. I’m feral, afraid of everyone, but I respond to cuddles. What is that supposed to say?’

‘It says exactly what it says. You have only known the wild. Your instinct to flee is highly developed. It’s a survival mechanism. That you respond to cuddles when you can’t avoid them is also a survival mechanism. The cuddler is given what he or she wants when you respond, so he/she is less liable to harm you. You either outrun them or outwit them. Those are your possibilities.’

‘Why don’t I have a past? I want to be like other boys.’

‘You have a past. You were raised by badgers. You were loved, in a way.’

‘No, not like that. I want a human past. I must have a mother somewhere. A father. I’d feel better about myself if I knew who they were.’

‘That’s not important in the book.’

‘Maybe not, but it might be interesting for some of your readers as well as me. The colonel’s wife could do some research, look for babies that went missing ten, twelve years ago; it would be easy enough to give some indication where I came from.’

‘I’ll think about it. No promises.’

‘And I fight and spit and bite the colonel’s wife when she bathes me; but later I’m tender towards her.’

‘That’s because you’ve learned. The less opposition you put up against these people the more they take care of you. You learn to give them a little so that you gain a lot.’

‘Where did you find me?’

‘That’s the last question.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘You were in my consciousness. I didn’t know you were there. I stumbled over you in a dream.’

‘Can we talk again, another time?’

‘That was your last question.’

‘You’re mean, you know that?’ He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t like the idea that I’m interested in anal scent glands.’ He scrambled down from the chair and returned to the other characters. They all looked my way. It was obvious they had problems.

Celia Gallagher, tall and leggy with a heart-shaped face, took a step in my direction and one of the others gave her a push. She took another two steps towards me and glanced back at the others.

I guzzled the dregs of my coffee and moved away from the table, dodging between the banners and flags of the protesters and striding across the road towards home.

*

Deborah Hope in The Australian talks to Peter Carey about the Australian view of his work:

“If I’ve ever had characters that start off being a little close to life, they’ve never come alive for me until all that’s destroyed and got rid of. So I really don’t do it.”

Novelists are “magicians” and “magpies”: “All the time I pick up little things, but they’re little things.”

“I’m just trying to make a work of art.” “I’m trying to make something that’s very beautiful; I’m trying to make something that’s a really nice river of prose.”

*

Tobias Buckell discusses the pros and cons of giving books away for free on the internet. I might be attracted to this kind of behaviour myself if someone else wasn’t doing it for me already.

*

The Tyler Morning Telegraph features a row between Peggy Sue, an old friend of Buddy Holly, and the late singer’s widow. Maria Elena Holly is trying to keep the other woman from selling a book – Whatever Happened to Peggy Sue? – detailing her relationship with Buddy Holly.

But how to push out? How to animate the static portrait? Ford Madox Ford writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running – what he calls “getting a character in”. Ford and his friend Joseph Conrad loved a sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: “He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway.” Ford comments: “that gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been ‘got in’ and can get to work at once.”

And again, in a quest to answer the question, What is character?

The truth is that the novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it. And the novelistic character is the very Houdini of that exceptionalism. There is no such thing as “a novelistic character”. There are just thousands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat, some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes.

What this writer has done over a series of novels is build a fictional world, Rocksburg, in western Pennsylvania’s coal mining district. Police Chief Mario Balzic, his wife Ruth, his mother who lives with them, Blazic’s colleagues and the people who work at City Hall, and the various criminals and witnesses to their crimes, the waitresses in the restaurants and the guys who serve behind the bars are the characters who inhabit the neighbourhood and the novels.

Constantine has an ear for dialogue that is as good as George V Higgins or Elmore Leonard, and he has the capacity to breathe life into his characters that is more convincing than either. Balzic, himself often the main protagonist in the early novels, is satisfyingly conflicted and convincing and must be one of the most engaging characters in today’s crime fiction scene in Europe or America.

In Joey’s Case:

Balzic had been trying to dodge Albert Castelucci for five months. There were only so many things he could say to a man whose only son had been shot to death, and he had long since said them all. He had apologized, sympathized, commiserated; he had explained again and again that it had not happened in his jurisdiction. It had happened in Westfield Township, only a matter of yards away from the Rocksburg border, it was true, but yards were yards and borders were borders. Balzic knew he was in trouble when he began protesting that he had been in Pittsburg when it happened, as if that mattered. The more he ducked the old man, the more the old man hounded him; the more he explained, the less the old man heard, or even pretended to hear. In no time, Balzic’s sympathy and commiseration had turned to irritation and then to frustration and then to anger; and then, one Sunday after Castelucci had confronted him after Mass in front of St. Malachy’s, Balzic heard himself saying, “Mr Castelucci, as far as your son was concerned, it was only a matter of time.”

Needless to say, Balzic eventually agrees to dabble around in someone else’s jurisdiction, gets himself sucked into something that almost amounts to a full-time job while he’s also administering his Rocksburg responsibilities, coping with absentee officers in his own force, and battling a severe case of sexual dysfunction.

But it’s not the first time Mario has been threatened by an overwhelming and hostile environment, and in this 1988 novel, he’s dealing every card in the pack to get Rocksburg back into some kind of order.

If you don’t know Constantine’s work, it’s worth trying to track one of these novels down. It could be exactly what you need to slip seamlessly into 2008.

Consider the most striking literary canonisation of our times. Jane Austen has always been esteemed, and FR Leavis sanctified her as one of the bearers of the “great tradition,” a sort of doctor of his secular church. But in the past 15 years she has turned into the English novelist, an inescapable part of the public consciousness, more universally present than any other writer bar Shakespeare. Some people think she owes her current prominence to popular fantasies of tight breeches and bosoms heaving beneath empire-line dresses. This does not seem likely: if that is what people want, they can get it more readily from Georgette Heyer. Another view is that she has benefited from nostalgia for a safer, quieter and more decorous world; but the idea that the world of her novels is cosy and comfortable can hardly survive the reading of them. Most of her modern popularity is the result of her actual merits, and in a broad sense the highbrows and the lower-middlebrows are admiring the same things: well-made plots, perceptive depiction of character and the acute study of social interaction. It is a genuine popular canonisation.

So what I have to do is start writing and see what happens. Eventually I get to know the world that comes trickling down from my brain and out of my fingertips. At some point I find a guy I sort of recognize. Then I cause him some trouble, usually give him a wry observation about whatever that trouble is, then make him get up and do something about it. Whatever he does is what I end up knowing. And eventually, if I keep banging away at it, not only do I finally know a little something, I typically get to love it too. So instead of writing what I know or writing what I love, I have to sort of reverse the order…I get to know and love what I write.