“I hate that guy...”: My problem with unloveable narrators

This was a recent conversation in our house:

Mr G: How is your book?

Me: Meh... 

Mr G: Why’s that?

Me: I don’t know. It’s not badly written but there’s something about the characters. The narrator is such an idiot. 

Mr G: Yeah, you never like books where you don’t like the main character.

Me: ...? Maybe.

This was a conversation about “Snowdrops” by A.D Miller, one of the Man Booker nominees for this year. To be honest, I was a little surprised that this book made it onto the shortlist. As I said before, it wasn’t badly written and I think it has suffered in reviews because it was on the shortlist. 

Meh...

What really bugged me about “Snowdrops” was the main character and first person narrator, Nick Platt. He was immature, selfish, willfully stupid and, I felt, completely self-deceiving. As a result the entire experience of the book was clouded for me. I resented spending my morning commute, my evenings and my snatched lunch hours with Nick Platt and I finished the book with an uncomfortable simmering resentment.  

It lead me to think about my book-nemesis. The book that evoked a twenty minute rant at my husband when I finished it (mainly because he happened to be there rather than because I held him responsible) and that I demanded be taken immediately to the charity shop (it still sits on a bookshelf in our loft as my husband thinks it’s amusing to see my reaction to its ongoing presence in our house). It’s “The Dice Man” by Luke Rhinehart and it was the narrator that was the centre of my disdain. I hate that guy. Basically I think that Rhinehart’s dice experiment is a mid-life crisis dressed up as philosophy - and bad philosophy at that. How can you argue that you are being driven in your decisions by chance or fate when the choices you give to the random dice throw are your own selection? (At this point I stepped away from the computer lest this turn into a twenty minute on-screen rant...)

Rubbish

And yet I have read many books where narrators made questionable moral decisions, were selfish, stupid, cruel and generally a bit rubbish and I have not hurled the book across the room in disgust. I clearly don’t have to see a new best friend in every narrator in order to get on board with or even love the book. Realistically there were other areas where “Snowdrops” could have been improved. The secondary characters were stereotypes and the story was a little predictable.* But for me, it’s all about Nick and isn’t dismissing a piece of writing on such a level just lazy? 

Shortly after finishing “Snowdrops” I read the book which won the 2011 Man Booker prize, the sublime, “The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes. A compact one hundred and fifty pages, this is, in my opinion, the best thing Barnes has written to date and a worthy winner of the prize. The narrator in this title is Tony. Tony is self-involved, arrogant, judgmental, inconsiderate and at various points downright cruel. But we are all these things at various points in our lives. What made me warm to Tony was that he was aware of this. In fact the book itself is about the realisation that our own version of our personal history is edited to our own design and that the bare truth is often far from what we remember it to be. Tony has self awareness and if I delve deeper, this is what makes me so angry about the characters of Nick and Luke. 

Brilliant

Books are an intense and highly personal experience. Unlike a film which engages your undivided attention for perhaps two hours, a book is part of your existence for many hours, days and even weeks.  For that time the book lives with us, it shares our meals, shares our journeys to work, our head-space - we even let it into our bed. And the characters in that book come with it. We can’t help but have emotional reactions and each one will be different. 

Who hasn’t had the experience of reading a “classic” or a book with great reviews and wondered what all the fuss was about? And would Dan Brown be sitting on his massive pile of money if there weren’t a good few people in the world who didn’t want to punch that smug git Robert Langdon in the face? One of the reasons we have such a rich world of literature available is that the audience for it is so diverse. So I think I can live with my prejudiced views on Nick Platt and Luke Rhinehart... I really hate those guys. 

* In its defence “Snowdrops” had its weaknesses but the sense of place it created was really something. A.D Miller’s Russia is vivid and brilliant.