Notably unheroic protagonists

It sometimes seems that the anti-hero is more at home in novels than (комфортнее чувствовать себя в романах) the hero. Most of recent novels have a protagonist whose fortunes the reader follows, yet in most cases they are notably unheroic. Briony in Atonement, Will in About a Boy, Lily in Magpie, Carmel in An Experiment in Love, to name but a few. These are the protagonists characterized by their failures and weaknesses. One use of the term ‘anti-hero’ has been to describe extreme cases of unheroic qualities. It has been applied to blundering, sometimes foolish protagonists: Lily in Magpie.

The term is, however, disputed. Some anti-heroes are good men baffled by the world (запутаться, потеряться в окружающем мире); this is a protagonist who draws us into sympathy despite doing things that should appall (вызывает у нас сочувствие, несмотря на то, что совершает ужасающие поступки) us.

The anti-hero takes possession of a narrative without any effective opposition. Villains, in contrast, are set against those who are inherently good (по-настоящему хороший). In the great majority of cases, a villain, however fascinating, exists to be defeated. In The Woman in White both Sir Percival Glyde and Count Fosco, the villains of the novel, are eventually defeated. Unlike anti-hero, the true villain is driven not only by simple greed or lust for power, but also by a kind of glee at his own badness. There is therefore another kind of risk in depicting villainy. Give the representative of evil the intellect and perceptiveness that make him a worthy antagonist and he might well become too intriguing.

It is no accident that (не случайно, что) the great Victorian novelists who specialized in villains were those closest to popular fiction. Wilkie Collins has several, including the wonderfully evil Count Fosco. “He looks like a man who could tame anything. If he had married a tigress, instead of a woman, he would have tamed the tigress. If he had married me, I should have made his cigarettes, as his wife does--I should have held my tongue when he looked at me, as she holds hers. I am almost afraid to confess it, even to these secret pages. The man has interested me, has attracted me, has forced me to like him. In two short days he has made his way straight into my favourable estimation, and how he has worked the miracle is more than I can tell.” (Mariam Halcombe’s diary, The Woman in White).

The villain is above all a plotter (заговорщик, интриган) and therefore we are obliged to him/her for many of the pleasures of the story (быть признательным ему / ей за все удовольствия, полученные от истории). The villain has made the plot for us. The villain therefore has to be intellectually gifted (see professor Moriarty in The Final Problem by A. Conan Doyle).

Foreignness is often an aspect of the true villain (Fosco, Moriarty, Auric Goldfinger, etc.). These genetically strange, everywhere foreign, beings are outside all normal laws, yet gifted with special powers (наделенный сверхъестественными способностями). They have to be defeated, yet, before this happens, they must dazzle us a little with their clear-eyed analysis (циничный взгляд на мир) of the world.

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