Protagonists and Authority

One thing that’s changed since I started writing my novels is how I read. I never studied literature outside of the compulsory stuff at school. To Kill A Mockingbird, Animal Farm, Romeo and Juliet and Far From The Madding Crowd. Even then, examining these works had less to do with technique and structure and more with understanding imagery and authorial intent and our personal emotional response. I can’t remember anything we ‘learned’ about FFTMC and all I took from the book was a disdain for Hardy that Jude the Obscure couldn’t ease, even if Tess eventually did. Poor Tess.

These days, having self-published Unregistered and after completing the first draft of its prequel, the works of others have taken on an added dimension. It’s become hard for me to read purely as a reader. It’s rare to find a book which I can settle into like a warm sea and rise and fall as the paragraphs and pages roll at their own pace underneath me. Instead, I am more likely to note how salty the sea is and which creatures lurk beneath the waves.

Every book is a precious gem in its own right. Even the bad ones. They all have facets and refract the light just so, some pleasingly and others not. And they all have flaws. Reading as a reader, for pleasure, I enjoyed the pace and energy of The Da Vinci Code. I dare not pick it up now. All I could see would be the flecks of dirt trapped within the crystal and the irregular shapes of the faces.

A while back, I received a recommendation for a book. It’s a spy story, they said. But it’s weird and there’s magic and djinni and all this alt-history stuff. Declare, by Tim Powers. Cool, I thought, and looked it up. It was on special on Kindle! Even better. Bought it. Started it. A wave of ‘meh’ washed over me.

This surprised me. The book has an interesting history. It received considerable critical acclaim on first publication and won two Best Novel prizes in 2001 including the World Fantasy Award. When it came out in Britain in 2010, it was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Declare is a well-regarded book.

And I can see why. Powers writes cleanly and effectively and he clearly researched thoroughly. The level of detail he goes into sometimes borders on atomically precise and the pace suffers as a result – Declare reads longer than its not inconsiderable 544 pages. Yet on a stylistic level, it is a pleasure to read. Powers can sling words, yo. No, I don’t mind the slow pace. I’ve dug through Lord Of The Rings multiple times and the thousand pages of The Stand didn’t bother me.

For my money, two things made Declare a slog to read. The first of these is no doubt a deliberate choice on the part of the author and totally justifiable. Powers obscures the greater picture of the setting and for the first 25% of the novel, I had no clear idea of just what the hell any of it meant. Sure, the protagonist, Hale, is a strange little boy with prophetic dreams who joins the British Secret Services at the start of World War 2 and is sent off to become a communist agent and he ends up in Paris working for a communist cell and…

This is fine. In the great seven card stud game of fiction, no author reveals their hole cards before they have to. What isn’t fine, and what I even now can’t begin to explain as I write this, is what Hales's motivation is, outside of duty.

Every author, especially in genre fiction, has to answer two questions for their protagonist. ‘What do they want?’ is the first. Every protagonist must move towards a goal of some kind. Something without which, their life will be incomplete. The second question – ‘What do they need?’ Storytelling theorists and instructors say that the protagonist has an inner wound which needs healing, something that stands in opposition to their want. The climax of the book sees the protagonist only able to fulfil his want or his recently realised need. Inner or outer victory. Satisfaction or closure.

After I finished Declare and put it down, I worked out what had been bugging me throughout the book. Hale, as a character, has almost no identity outside of being the hero and the abilities and powers he possesses by authorial fiat. I cannot tell you what he wants to achieve by completing his mission. I cannot tell you what his secret psychic wound is, not for sure. He grows up without a father, and the father’s identity is relevant to the plot, but Powers never once identifies this as a significant motivation. Hale is flat as a character and following his journey through the plot became a chore for me.

Now, you might point out that a flat character arc is not entirely unreasonable for spy novels, and I would agree with you. It’s also common for detective novels, of any type, to have a flat main character. Nobody read Murder on The Orient Express to see how Poirot deals with his childhood traumas, either.

Novels like these are competence porn. We read for the thrill of the chase. Pace is everything - none of Fleming’s Bond novels broke 300 pages, for example - along with a satisfying denouement. Bond defeats Blofeld, Miss Marple uncovers the killer. But Declare is not competence porn. It is slow and precise and exact and the protagonist has the depth of a muddy puddle and all the appeal of one, too. I didn’t care about him. I didn’t care about his mission or Operation Declare and while I admired the world-building, none of it mattered because I felt no connection to Hale, who demonstrated no special competencies or qualities or personal traits at all.

Chuck Palahniuk made the point that for a reader to connect with a protagonist (actually, to make the protagonist authentic and the right character to lead us through the story), the writer must make them appeal to either the reader’s head or heart through being either competent as all hell – like James Bond or Sam Spade – or relatably flawed and sympathetic. Powers, in my opinion, failed on both counts with Hales.

This is my breadcrumb for Declare – the protagonist has to be authentic. They need something, anything to make them relatable. They must want something and have to pursue it in order for the reader to become invested in their journey. Something the reader can identify or sympathise or empathise with.