Be Excellent To Each Other

So, who's your favourite literaryaryaryaryary character? Which character do you most admire or most makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, or do you most identify with?

I've love to say that mine was someone like Gatsby, Yossarian, Ralph, or, even, Bertie Wooster, but embarrassingly it's someone from a less "serious" author.

My favourite character ever in the universe is, I'm afraid to say, Samuel Vimes from our chap Mr Pratchett's books.

He's a deeply flawed fellow, but despite being a reformed alcoholic and not the "sharpest knife in the drawer" (as people are constantly at pains to remind him) he's risen to the highest office he could aspire to and he's a dogged, loyal, upstanding chap who is deeply committed to both his duty and to his family. The bits in "Thud!" with Young Sam are enough, as a dad, to make me a little damp around the edges.

"THAT'S NOT MY COW!"

He's also a seriously hard bastard, but doesn't really want to be - he's somewhat scared of his propensity for violence and is constantly holding it in check. He's also a fairly humble chap who hasn't let his sudden accumulation of massive wealth and titles get to him, and he seems to be continually waiting for the other shoe to drop rather than taking his good fortune for granted.

He's also terminally cynical and suspicious, which seems eminently sensible in anyone.

In short, he's teh aces.

As an aside, I'd note that I'm aware I have not described this at all well. I had this idea on the way back from London but got drunk twixt then and now and am now, consequently, less articulate and able to explain myself than I was when this came to me. Pah. T'eva. I shall edit this tomorrow.


So! Who's your person?

Lecter was a fantastic nutter.

Also - Vimes has a family? I'm only a bit of the way through the second in the series.

Hahahah, sorry. Mild spoilers there. But it's apparent after the FIRST Vimes book.

It's fantastically difficult to choose, but I'd have to say that it's down to either Jack Aubrey or Stephen Maturin of the Patrick O'Brian 'Master & Commander' novels.

And of the two, well... hngh.. tricky. Maturin dominates with his inner voice and perception, and indeed O'Brian's personality and experience closely echo Maturin's, but without ever becoming a mere mouthpiece of the author. He is arguably a deeper character than Jack, but on the whole I'd have to plump for Mr Aubrey. He's so full of life and I painfully admire him in certain ways, and find him hilariously pitiable in others.

For example Jack is a great leader by sea, never fatally familiar with the men but quick to strike up a friendship. He treats everybody equally and yet values his friends such as Lt. Pullings, Preserved Killick and Mowatt. He plays the fiddle tolerably well and takes great pleasure in music, despite his bluff, bawdy and boisterous 'roast beef' exterior. He is a great seaman, though he does not suffer from the sin of pride.

But on the other hand, he has a fondness for poor, wretched puns that make him hurt himself with laughter. He is tempted to 'play away', and does to his cost. He has absolutely no facility for penetration on shore, is eminently gullible when faced by landsmen and is defrauded many a time. He also isn't quite as cunning or dissembling as he believes.

But in these flaws and strengths he complements Maturin perfectly. Indeed, it is this that is the bedrock of their friendship for they share no common taste other than music and certain friends. I'd far sooner choose both, because without one bouncing off the other a lot would be lost. But as I am pressed, Jack Aubrey. God bless him, I genuinely live his adventures.

Excellent stuff, Pete.

I still need to get round to reading the books, having bought a few after loving the film. As I've mentioned before I got briefly into one of them and got a bit, ahem, bored. But I shall give it another rattle this week as I loved the characters in the film - and I can only assume they're better in the books!

They are indeed. It took me a couple of goes to crack Master & Commander, but once you finish that why, there it is! It becomes as easy as kiss-my-hand. If you slide into their world, the depth of emotion and the sense of a living, breathing world outclasses other historical fiction as The Wire does other 'cop' shows.

Holden Caulfield is a class A twat, but I like him all the more for it.

Fight Club narrator. 'Jack'. Not Tyler Durden. Unless, of course,

Please define the term meta character in words that i can understand.

Imlac, from out of Rasselas. A poet and philosopher whose wisdom is matched only by his modesty and benevolence.

Salvor Hardin from Foundation, for being benevolent but ultra-cunning, and stealing the show with a pretty small part of an ambitious book (One of his mottos is "Never let your sense of morals prevent you form doing what is right!", which pretty much says all you need to know).

The unnamed protagonist of The Society of Others (close runner up is Vicenzo), for being brilliantly written, intelligent and perceptive, and developing drastically without just morphing into another character altogether.

Richard Remington from The New Machiavelli, if not for general depth of character then for several of his most excellent, furious rants about a society that's still the same now as it was a century ago:



Mellors from Lady Chatterley's Lover (which starts really poorly, but I'm glad I stuck with it because he just gets better the more he speaks.

Hector and Henry from Henry Tumour. It's a bit of a cheat, but they're a double act and to separate them would literally kill at least one of them. A brilliant, brilliant book*, and the only book about a teenager that's ever been remotely accurate. And they're funny and intelligent, and wise, but also prone to spite and selfishness, and their relationship develops beautifu... aargh, damn it! Stop posting threads about books! You'll have me up all night.


*Probably best summed up by a reviewer somewhere or other:

I very much identify with The Very Hungry Caterpillar, myself.

Mr Greedy.

Oooh, going for bad-boy favourites, Sebastian Dangerfield in The Ginger Man is unrestrained excellence. He is a Yank from a well-to-do background who is awaiting his inheritance. In the meantime he's been forced to marry his girlfriend as he got her knocked up with a child he most definitely does not want. He continually pawns his and his wife's possessions to spend on booze whilst he's cavorting with the lower orders in public houses when he's supposed to be studying law at Trinity in Dublin. He also undertakes various shenanigans with other women, and despite this being Uber-Catholic-era Ireland (1930s, I think) he manages to talk them round to sullying their immortal souls - whilst he's a cad, he's charming one.

Although at one point after a visit to a butcher's shop he gets into an argument on a tram as some chap tells him off for having his "meat showing" - Sebastian enters into a full-throttled defence of a man's right to sit on a tram with his newly-bought steak partly unwrapped, but of course the gentleman was referring to Sebastian's todge, which he had forgotten to put away after a visit to a pub toilet. The incredible shame of this provokes a massive argument with his wife and another binge...

Basically he's a saultary lesson in trying to live the life of the moneyed upper class when you may be upper class but don't, in fact, have any money at all - only the epectation of it.

However. I think I am the only person in the world who has read any books by JP Donleavy, so there we are.

My favourite character is Yezzer from the Misadventures of Mr Yezzer.

That crazy lad gets into all kinds of madcap shenanigans.

Philip Marlowe from Raymond Chandler's novels
Bernard Samson from Len Deighton's Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match, Spy Hook, Spy Line, Spy Sinker, Faith, Hope, Charity series.

I was going to say Mr Bump!

Biggles. Of the Royal Flying Corps.

Shut UP.

I've just read John Buchan's "The 39 Steps" and am currently reading the follow-up "Greenmantle". I want to be Richard Hannay. The sort of person who can call the Battle of Loos "no picnic" and then sneak the entire length of Germany and Turkey despite speaking neither language before foiling some terrible plot is someone to be looked up to.

I so wanted to be Ford Prefect in my younger years, I would stand in the school playground pointing up at the sky and proclaiming to everyone that a Vogon Constructor Fleet was coming to destroy the Earth 'any second now.'

Um. So there you go.

Ford is cool , but I bet a lot of people secretly fear they are Arthur :-(