Who better to offer advice on writing unreliable and uncooperative characters than author and Tabooco-creator Chips Hardy? A little dysfunction goes a long, long way, he says.
I have always felt at home with the dislocated, the disconnected and the dysfunctional. People who are somehow denied an anodyne sense of self and place, and who have to endure and hopefully prevail without them. So, I’m fascinated by what happens to people who cross the line – be they soldiers, pioneers, addicts, explorers, artists, criminals – and how that dislocation causes them to follow ever more dangerous paths. Dislocation causes many to create a new, contingent self, and to protect this fragile sense of identity and place, they often perform all kinds of antithetical acts. Pioneers might discard their ‘civilisation’, soldiers may murder, artists may defile; all pressed by a perverse logic that underpins their survival. This self-sustaining disconnection ensures they can never safely return.
Of course, such self-excluded outliers are the stuff of emotionally charged stories. They inform my work from TV drama like Tabooto novels like Seaton’s Orchid and stage plays like Blue on Blue. Their dysfunction both inspires and disrupts.
The unreliable narrator
One of the ways writers have examined the exigences of operating outside the mainstream of narrative is the Unreliable Narrator. A lot has been theorised about them – often broken down into types that range from the naive to the excluded, the embellisher, the insane and the downright liar. It’s a mechanism that has produced some of the most popular fictional beings and has been employed by some of the most talented and technically adroit authors.
I was first conscious of meeting an Unreliable with Mr Pooter in Diary of A Nobody, later to be followed by Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Jules Renard’s exquisite Sponger. All pleasantly and comically unreliable.
Things got a little more serious with Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita, John Banville’s Freddie Montgomery in the Book of Evidenceand Gerard Woodward in Osborne’s Ballad of A Small Player and others who take us for an articulate and knowingly trip through their dissembling, but where the final denouement is still left unspoken. Not really comical anymore. Damnable yet witty and humane, as if the Serpent from Paradise Losthad produced his memoirs. And then there are such as Sam Beckett’s Malone and Molloy and Celine’s earliest fictional persona Ferdinand Bardamu, who resolutely embrace the unreliability of narration as the only o
