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Unrelatable Characters

I know what you’re thinking, that glen, with his blog site and his twitter feed, he’s so modern and urbane; he’s like the first digital wristwatch compared to us , ticking by in our humdrum analog existence. Its ok, its right to feel this way, its only natural. However, before you haul yourself to the top of the nearest high building (via the stairs, not the lift naturally) let me put you at ease. I counterbalance my online apparent techno-savvy by being generally technophobic. My iphone has just two apps and no capital ‘P’, I still buy my music on CDs, and I have no television. I’ve been tv free now for a whole fortnight.

A result of my goggle-box free lifestyle is that I have begun reading more books. I like reading books, so much so I have an English A-level and an English degree and everything (no, seriously I do). I am generally open to most reading suggestions but I draw the line at general book trends, and as such Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Dan Brown and the Twilight series (which incidently I have seen brilliantly refered to as ‘an intersting glimpse into the spank bank of the modern teenage girl’) have remained firmly outside my own literary canon. I thought that was pretty much the only cast-iron boundary to my reading habits, until I recently reawokeanother factor which will instantly put me off a book; that of the shamelessly middle-class character.

I recently read Joseph O’Neil’s Netherland a book about a Dutch banker/broker who finds solace in New York through the game of cricket. Its a good novel, and it jumped out at me from the shelf as the kind of book I would enjoy, and I did, until any association I had built up with the character was blown away, thirty-eight pages in by this passage; “We’d agreed that whatever else happened we wouldn’t be moving back to Tribeca. The loft would be sold and the net proceeds, comfortably over a million dollars, would be invested in government bonds, a cautious spread of stocks and, on a tip from an economist I trusted, gold. We had another two million dollars in a joint savings account… and two hundred thousand in various checking accounts, also in our joint names.”

That’s it, that’s me tapping out, in fact I pretty much put the book down at that point. I simply cannot relate to this character and that kind of wealth. This is the dividing line for me. I have no problem relating to characters who are in the midst of war, or who are from different time periods in history. That’s all fine, but the moment I’m faced with a posh, or rich (or both) discernibly middle-class character in the first person I lose all association with their plight and begin to side with whichever force or person they seem to be up against.

With Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love I only made it as far as page 3 before the follwing passage caused me to let out a weary now-this-is-gonna-be-a-struggle sigh. “[I] found a semi legal place to park, close to Carluccio’s. I went in and put together a picnic whose centre-piece was a great ball of mozarella which the assistant fished out of an earthware vat with a wooden claw. I also bought black olives, mixed salad and focaccia.” What? No scotch egg?

Now don’t get me wrong, this is no slight on the authors, these are both well written novels; indeed Netherland is reportedly a favourite of Barack Obama no less. And the fact that I am so instantly turned against these characters perhaps shows how well they have been constructed. No, this is purely a personal problem, my own mental tick. I just can’t help it, I cannot immerse myself in this text because I go to my natural reaction, which, if faced with someone parking illegally in order to by a large ball of mozarella for a picnic would be “what a twat”.

#unrelatable characters #Ian McEwan #Joseph O'Neil #fiction #literature