Why I love anti-heroes – guest post from Victoria Lamb
February 20, 2012
Happy Monday – I’m delighted to welcome a guest to start the week.
Victoria Lamb, is a fellow member of the RNA and her Tudor historical novel, The Queen’s Secret, is out this week. Victoria loves anti-heroes but why?
The attraction of anti-heroes
“For another blog interview on this tour to launch The Queen’s Secret, I was asked to write about my hero and why I loved him so much – the theory being that a writer must “love” their hero, otherwise why make him the hero? Of course, The Queen’s Secret is not a romance, per se, which gave me my first headache in answering this question. There isn’t one clear-cut hero, but a range of possible heroes or male protagonists. Though of course, I have my favourite among those, which is Master Goodluck.
Master Goodluck is my young heroine’s guardian, and Lucy loves him dearly. Yet Goodluck is not a traditional hero-type. For a start, he’s not conventionally attractive – broad build, huge beard, a great belly laugh, he’s a kind of Falstaffian figure. He doesn’t do much that could be considered heroic.
He’s a Tudor theatrical and a spy, so he’s a good actor and also courageous, used to facing danger. But he doesn’t go about looking bold and invincible. He’s clever but prefers to hide it. He’s a trickster, a master of disguises. He lurks in the shadows, and would see nothing wrong in running away from a fight if the odds were against him.
So why would I instinctively identify such a character as the “hero” of my novel? I suspect it’s because I’ve always loved the anti-hero. Anti-heroes are a type you tend to find in crime and detective novels, or film noir: Sam Spade, Sherlock Holmes, Morse. They also crop up in adventure stories: Rick Blane in Casablanca, James Bond, Indiana Jones. As a type, they tend not to grow as people, remaining cynical and unloved from one end of the story to the other.
Master Goodluck does not change much in this first novel – though there are two more to come – but to my mind he is the moral core of the story, and certainly the man Lucy admires most in the world. He’s also a point of view character: I couldn’t imagine Goodluck not having a voice. That, and the fact that I would sleep with him in an instant, tells me that Master Goodluck is my “hero”. Or as close to a hero as I am ever likely to get.”
The Queen’s Secret (Bantam Press, £12.99) is available in hardback and on Kindle: “A gripping historical novel of spies, lies and adultery set in Tudor England during the reign of Elizabeth I.”
You can find Victoria on the web at:
http://victorialambbooks.blogspot.com
Posted by Phillipa @ 5:20 am | Leave a Comment
Victoria Lamb Says:
Many thanks for having me on your lovely blog, Phillipa!
Vx
Stevie Carroll Says:
I love antiheroes too. And characters who don’t fit the traditional definitions of what a hero or heroine should look like.