My intention always was to write novels. Not genre novels, satisfying (and convenient) as it might be to have a familiar hero or heroine on whom I could rely. A Hornblower, or a Miss Marple. My reason is simple. What interests me - what has always interested me - are people. We are remarkable creatures; generous and grasping, kind and evil, altruistic almost beyond belief, and selfish enough sometimes to draw blood.
I state these obvious and banal contrasts not for rhetorical effect, but to buttress my main point, namely, that all these attributes, admirable or otherwise, can co-exist in the same person. I have not found people to be purely one thing or the other. I have to admit some characters seem to have fewer flaws, or fewer virtues than most of us (say, Mother Teresa, or the late unlamented Fuhrer) but even they are not all good, or all bad. Look into yourself - honestly - and see if I am wrong.
Now, serious fiction has a function other than that of a means of filling the hours on long plane journeys, or more usefully, while waiting for them to begin. Yes, it hopes to entertain, yet it also should seek to illuminate dilemmas, to challenge accepted beliefs. If from time to time in any novel you do not receive a jolt which makes you pause and think, you are not reading serious fiction - at least in my view. I say more about this in Writing Class. But if that is true, it follows that characters in a novel cannot be black or white.
This came home forcefully to me first when I wrote An Ornament To His Profession. One or two people in it are, to say the least, unsympathetic. Yet when you learn more about them, or discover their past, or simply speculate what that past must have been (I have in mind Muriel and Elaine, of course) you have to feel that possibly they have been sinned against too. I don’t say that makes them lovable. And one thing has proved undoubtedly true: paradoxically, my “bad” characters are usually sympathised with by readers. Well, that just goes to show we’re not all bad ourselves!
Ornament, then is a novel of psychology, with action, and although it is sad, it has to be, given the predicament I set up - a doctor who enters his profession to give an outlet for the love he yearns to express but is not able to. And Adulteress Anonymous is also one, with less action, but is not really sad, although the underlying situation is, because Frances is wrestling with her twisted ideals and immaturity, but with love which she can express, and for everybody. May I add at this point, to avoid misunderstanding, or even possibly, disappointment, that despite its title, this novel is not a mindless series of sexual encounters described in embarrassing detail. And yet it is frank enough when necessary, as you can read in one of the excerpts. Sex is one its subjects, because sex is an inevitable participant in affairs of the heart. As Daniel says in one of his sonnets to Frances “Our lust is but a messenger, made hot / with self-important scurrying between,”… But you will have to read those for yourself.
When you come to WHY, however, you have an entirely different situation. This is a satire on, well, just about everything. Our entire modern society, and all human behaviour. Simon, the narrator, is clearly not exactly in his right mind. Indeed, as someone contemplating suicide, he is in that state almost by definition. But it frees him to see the world through entirely new eyes. His hang-ups distort that vision, true, even caricature it, but they do not make his observations and conclusions valueless.
Think of how a cartoon can encapsulate, often hilariously, a political situation. I am reminded of one in The Times years ago in the John Major era, when whales had been stranded on beaches and people had tried to rescue them. The cartoon showed a whale with Major’s face, some ministers anxiously comforting him, others trying to drag him up the beach even further to make his plight worse, and Heseltine standing back with his arms ostensibly folded, not helping, but taking no responsibility. That said it all. WHY is such a cartoon, in literary form, exaggerating, mocking, but containing truths which are frankly highly uncomfortable to the rest of us. Simon can say the un-sayable. And because of his situation, do so without having to justify it in a real-life context. But the corollary is, the one thing he doesn’t do is find any amusement in it. If we laugh, we do so without him. To him his situation is perfectly serious - as indeed in a very real sense it is. We will lament what has happened, but not very deeply. In the tragi-comedy which WHY really is, the tragedy, although there, is muted.
The fourth novel, Man To Mann, again inevitably, is a psychological drama, the outline of which is reasonably clearly represented in the blurb accompanying the cover page. Here the problem is totally different - one of self-recognition. Mann is not deluded. He understands the world all too well. But although he knows exactly what his own problem is he cannot bring himself to confront it. It takes the events of the novel to clear his vision, and heal the wound.