Complexities

My favorite books focus on complex characters. I’m always willing to forgive a weakish plot if the characters involved are so finely drawn that just reading about them is interesting. The books with strong plots and complex characters are, of course, the real winners. When it comes to romance novels, I’m a fan of the classic tortured hero (although when I finally read Wuthering Heights, I wasn’t as enamoured of Heathcliff as I’d expected to be), but it’s the books – romance or otherwise – featuring strongly multi-faceted women that I remember.

They are memorable not only because of who they are, but also because of what they do. And “what they do” is often breach sexual norms. Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Grim fates notwithstanding, these are characters whom the authors paint with single-haired brush so as to detail every crevice of their psyches. More recent books that come to mind are Memoirs of a Geisha, Slammerkin, and the character of Sibylla in Helen deWitt’s The Last Samurai, who is easily one of the most unique and fascinating characters in fiction. Another book I love is MR Lovric’s Carnevale, the story of a 16th century Venetian portrait painter and her affairs with Casanova and Byron. Cecelia has a sharp wit, a barbed tongue. an enviable artistic talent and a completely defiant attitude towards convention. What’s not to admire?

When writing romance novels, the difficulty in creating a female protagonist who is complex to the point of being somewhat unsympathetic is that the reader has less reason to hope for her final happiness. Moreover, it’s all the more difficult to make a relationship believeable since there are more internal hurdles for the characters to overcome. It’s easy to make a hero fall in love with a pure, virtuous, virginal heroine. It’s not so easy to make him fall in love with a woman with a dramatic history of sexual conflict, drug use and crime.

I personally think such a heroine would be far more interesting to write (and read about), but I’m not familiar with any such heroine in romance novels. If you are, please tell me because I think romances containing more obstacles for the protagonists to overcome lead to a far more satisfying and welcome conclusion. The more difficult the path, the sweeter the reward – or something like that. Heroines who have lived a lot, stuck to their guns and gone after what they want – well, they deserve no less than a happy ending.