The importance of character

I’m not one to give up on a book. Once started I will stick through it, with very few exceptions. It has to be very badly written for me to give up.

I’ve been reading a very poor book. It was a novel, a murder story, set on an old pilgrim road to Canterbury, Kent. That much I thought had promise. I can enjoy a good murder & I was looking for something light as I’d just been reading a heavy novel before that.

This was light. The characters were paper thin. It took me the three week loan period to get through the 180 or so pages. Even at the end very few of the characters could I tell you who was who or their inter-relation. I think the book was supposed to work on the basis of the intrigue of the puzzle but it failed even on that. I know I find Agatha Christie’s characters a bit light, but she never fails when it comes to coming up with complex crimes.

I ended up skip-reading the book. I only stuck with it at all in the hope it might eventually pick up or the mystery might develop into something worthwhile. It didn’t.

So I started another novel this week. I’m already more than half way through. The characters are so alive they leap off the page. I’m keen to find out more.

It has never struck me how important good characterisation is. It doesn’t matter if they are nice people, ones I particularly sympathise with but they must be rounded. I accept in most books certain characters have to be a bit thin as otherwise they can detract from the momentum of the storyline, but it is one thing for the minor characters to be a bit thin, another when it’s all the characters. When reading a novel I want to disappear into that world, escape from this though maybe get some insight into this. I want to be entertained, not bored. I want to be challenged, to go one an adventure into a foreign land of someone else’s imagination. I certainly don’t want to end up wondering why I’d bothered.