Booking Through Thursday: Villains...

From Booking Through Thursday:

Who’s the worst fictional villain you can think of? As in, the one you hate the most, find the most evil, are happiest to see defeated? Not the cardboard, two-dimensional variety, but the most deliciously-written, most entertaining, best villain? Not necessarily the most “evil,” so much as the best-conceived on the part of the author…oh, you know what I mean!

Aaah, a good villain is a wonderful thing to find! And so many villains are simple. To make villainy understandable, to make it interesting - that's the real mark of an exceptionally good writer. Shakespeare can do it - Iago, Macbeth, Edmund - but then, Shakespeare could do anything. And nobody is the villain of their own story.

At first thought, a lot of my favourite villains are from movies, because the 'villain' characterization is enhanced by good acting on the part of someone talented, who fills in the illusion of a complete personality. Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber, or Jeremy Irons as Simon Gruber; Martin Shaw or Ian McKellen as Chauvelin; Jason Isaacs as Tavington - though adducing such a badly-written movie as The Patriot is beside the point.

So: I claim the privilege to pick three great villains, not just one.

1. Magneto, Master of Magnetism, from Marvel comics, particularly X-Men. A Marvel mutant and opponent of the X-Men, I originally thought he was absurd: a silly helmet, purple costume, lots of posturing and pompousness .... But as the years went by the character was refined and defined and embellished in the hands of some superb writers. Chris Claremont made him into a hero; others made him into a madman; but in his pride and his arrogance he has kept his dignity through amnesia, cloning, imprisonment, regression, and more deaths than Captain Jack Harkness. (Well, maybe not.)
   
   The joy of Magneto is that he makes psychological sense. An extremely powerful mutant who was thrown into Auschwitz as a boy, his resentment of humanity's evils are well-founded and his pyschology usually sound. Throw in his love/hate relationship with the X-Men's Professor Xavier, his various acts of nobility, his speechifying, and those gorgeous pictures of him by Jim Lee and others... he's a villain one can sit back and enjoy.
   
   Magneto belongs to that realm of villainy where distinction between villain and anti-hero is blurred.



2. Captain Marcus Falcone from the Karin Lowachee novels, Warchild and Cagebird. Falcone is captain of the Genghis Khan, a spacefaring pirate who preys on children. He is primarily a slaver, which is villainous enough, but in the context of the novels, his villainy consists of the damage done to our viewpoint characters - boys he takes in as his personal proteges and warps to his purposes. He takes advantage of a war with aliens to create his own crime-based empire.
   
   Falcone was fascinating to me because he seemed as real as he was horrible. Always manipulative, always twisting a situation to his purposes. Without conscience, but with - if he cared to show it - a degree of cold charm. In my opinion, a brilliant creation. He put chills down my back.
   
   Falcone belongs to that realm of villainy where we witness the evil of socipathy and psychological manipulation.



3. Bradley Headstone, from Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens.
   
   I have several reasons for picking Headstone, one being that he is pitted against one of my favourite Dickens heroes, the clever and careless lawyer Eugene Wrayburn. The joy is that Dickens reverses the moral expectations here. Bradley Headstone is a schoolteacher, devoted to helping and teaching underprivileged boys - or at least one such boy, Lizzie Hexham's bright young brother Charlie. Eugene Wrayburn is devoted to nothing except his own sarcastic whims and lazy pleasures - not yet a rake, though maybe headed that way; a self-indulgent, wealthy, intelligent man with no need to earn a living and no incentive to be useful.
   
   Both men want the same woman, and come to loggerheads over her. In his desire to love and protect Lizzie Hexham, Headstone becomes desperate. Little by little he loses his moral ground, torn between love of Lizzie and hatred of Eugene, until driven to violence and viciousness. Eugene Wrayburn, conversely, in his pursuit of casual seduction, finds redemption in love and a new purpose in life.
   
   I adore the moral inversion there. Our Mutual Friend is said to be about the corruptive influence of money - and yes, there's a theme I can get behind, no wonder I love this book! - but it's really about the corruptive influence of greed and desire. Most of the other characters are corrupted by love of money or knowledge, but in Headstone's case, it's desire for a woman that is his downfall - and Wrayburn's salvation.
   
   Bradley Headstone belongs to that realm of villainy where good intentions become the road to personal disintegration.

~ ~ ~

¹ Why was he in Auschwitz? Because he was a Jew? Because he was a mutant? Because he was a gypsy? Through numerous retcons and rewritings the reason has become confused. Could he have been all of these things? Does it matter why?

Success...

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind. - George Bernard Shaw

I don't agree with Shaw - I think being successful is just a step to the next challenge.