Welcome back to Book Break. In this video we are going to talk about
morally grey characters, those characters that you just
keep rooting for even though they keep making pretty terrible
moral decisions. We're not talking full-on villains here,
but I do think that the spectrum of morally grey characters can range
from pretty sympathetic characters who just make a few
bad decisions, all the way to a full-blown
anti-hero, who is basically the villain of the story but they just have those
few redeeming qualities that you just keep rooting for them. So in this video
I'm going to talk about morally grey characters from
all of those different categories. But let's start in the shallow end.
Let's start with those characters that are pretty much sympathetic,
except they keep making terrible decisions. So a great example here is the
couple Tom and Izzy from The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman.
This is a really beautiful, moving book, about a couple
who can't have children, they've been trying and trying to conceive and it's
pretty devastating for them, and they live on this remote island
because Tom is the lighthouse keeper. And one day a boat washes up on their
shore with a dead man in it and a crying alive baby.
And so Tom and Izzy make the decision to not report this, and take the baby and
raise it as their own. So pretty morally grey
decision there, but you just feel for them
so much. But of course a decision like that isn't going to come without
consequences, so as the years go by this secret comes
back to haunt them, and it's just devastating, and a really moving book. And
then I thought about The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. And basically
everyone in this book is a morally grey character so
I could have focused on anyone but let's look at Daisy Buchanan in particular.
So Daisy is really hard to read, which makes her very interesting as a
character, and while she is this rich privileged
woman, she hasn't necessarily had a very happy
life, so she's ended up with this very pessimistic outlook. So you do feel sorry
for her, but at the same time that doesn't excuse
quite how cruel her treatment of Jay Gatsby is throughout
most of the novel, and towards the end of the book she
inadvertently does something even worse. Stay With Me by Ayobami
Adebayo is a brilliant book. This is the story of a marriage between
this Nigerian couple who are very very deeply in love, but are again unable to
have children. And they're getting a lot of pressure
from their families who don't understand why the husband, Akin, won't take multiple
wives in order to have children. That's something that is considered very
normal in their culture, but the two of them
had agreed wasn't for them, but eventually this family pressure does
take over. And we switch back and forth between their perspectives
and watch as both of these characters do very morally questionable things,
but all in the name of keeping their marriage alive. Little Fires Everywhere by
Celeste Ng has had a big resurgence lately because
of the brilliant TV show. So a lot of people are talking about
all of the morally grey dilemmas in this book. There are so many morally grey
characters, there are these impossible situations
where as a reader or as a viewer of the TV show you genuinely
don't know which is the right answer. So I could
have talked about anything in this book, but the character I specifically wanted
to focus on is Mia. So Mia is a single mother and an artist
who is constantly moving home, bringing her child with her,
but at the beginning of this novel she moves into
Shaker Heights, this planned community where everything is seemingly perfect,
and she ends up getting caught in the middle of
this huge debate between two mothers. But we also,
as the book goes on, learn more about Mia's own past,
and the secret that she is running from, this terrible decision that she made in
her past. And then just one more from this
category. In My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite,
we have two sisters. The serial killing sister is a bit more straightforward in
terms of morality, but our narrator is her sister, who isn't
killing anyone, but she is the one who's helping her
sister clean up and hide the bodies afterwards.
But you do feel really sorry for her. She is trying to get her sister to stop
killing people, but at the same time it's hard even for
her to know where her loyalties really lie.
OK and then there's another category of morally grey characters, the
characters that you start off liking, but whose ambition ends up driving them
too far. And Shakespeare has a lot of characters like this, but I thought let's
look specifically at Hamlet. Hamlet is driven by revenge, he
wants to avenge the death of his father, which you know in real life we don't
necessarily celebrate people going on vengeance-inspired killing sprees, but
within a Shakespearean context you kind of get on board with it.
But as the play goes further and further, Hamlet ends up being driven
more by his own resentment and insecurity, and ends up
committing just as many terrible deeds as the man he originally set out to
punish. And then there's Wolf Hall by Hilary
Mantel, which is about Thomas Cromwell and his rise to power in the court of
Henry VIII. And Thomas Cromwell has been portrayed
in historical fiction before as this totally unprincipled calculating man,
but here we get to see a different side of him. In Wolf Hall we see him as this
more pragmatic, sensible, tolerant man who
genuinely is trying to best serve his king and
country, but ends up getting caught up in this power struggle. And then in a
similar category to that there are the characters who are
themselves victims of terrible things, so you feel really sorry for them,
but this ends up driving them to do bad things of their own.
And in this category I can't say too much about the books i'm going to
mention because of spoilers, but i'll just drop you some hints. So for
example there is Constance Little, the main character in
If I Can't Have You by Charlotte Levin. So Constance gets obsessed with a man
who treats her really badly, so you absolutely hate him the most, but
it gets harder and harder to justify her actions as the book goes on.
At first it's a lot of those moments of 'okay
I've been there, probably shouldn't have done that but I did',
but then Constance just takes it into a whole new territory.
And then in The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen,
I really really can't explain much here because of spoilers, so I will just say
there are unreliable narrators, twists and turns,
and reveals that will make you question everyone's motivations,
even while you're rooting for them, which is always fun. And then another category
I really enjoy here are the ambiguous characters:
are they guilty or aren't they? So an example would be Alias Grace by Margaret
Atwood. This is a historical fiction novel set
in the 1840s about a woman called Grace who was a
servant and was accused of murdering her master and his housekeeper. So we
meet her after she's been sentenced to life imprisonment,
but this psychiatrist called Dr Simon Jordan is trying to uncover
what really happened, because Grace claims to have no memories of the
murders at all. And then there's Little Deaths by Emma
Flint, which has another great did she or didn't she character. So here
we have a single mother called Ruth in 1960s New York, who has been accused
of murdering her two children. And this case is stacked against her
from the start, the detectives already looked down on her
because of the provocative clothes that she wears, the relationships she's had,
the empty whiskey bottles scattered around her apartment, but one particular
reporter is determined to dig deeper. He's sure there must be more to
the story than there appears, and more to the very hard-to-read Ruth
herself. And then to finish off we have a full-blown
anti-hero, Joe Goldberg from You. He's not really
morally grey at all, he's just a straight-up villain, but the
way he is written in this book is so charming and so manipulative that
somehow he gets the readers rooting for him and liking him
throughout the book. It is very very creepy and leaves you really
questioning what's going on inside your own head. The author Caroline Kepnes has
actually said she's had to tell people to stop writing
her love letters to Joe because he's a murderer, you're not supposed to
love him! So I would love to know who your favourite morally grey characters
from books are. And if you like your characters a
bit more straightforwardly evil, we also made a video on the 13 absolute
worst villains in literature, so do click
through to watch that next, and we'll see you next time!