WARNING – HARRY POTTER SPOILER.
MICHAEL TYNE SPOILERS TOO, FOR THAT MATTER
Katie W – daughter of my friend ‘Cashpoint’ Tony - is twenty-some years old and is still alive and well. The reason this is relevant is that she nearly died at the age of twelve, when she very kindly lent me her copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Why? Because, as she handed over the pristine and much-awaited hardback copy, she said to me two words: “Dumbledore dies”.
That’s one hell of a spoiler.
Fortunately, I was (and am) very fond of Katie and did not, therefore, commit murder. I don’t even take the mickey out of her about it nowadays. Much.
What started me thinking about this is that I have just had to kill a character. Regular readers will at this point be yawning and examining their fingernails.
So what? they will cry. Nothing new there.
It’s true that, even compared to other oeuvres in which a high mortality rate among characters is seen as a characteristic – The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Midsomer Murders, RuPaul's Drag Race – I’m uncommonly murderous. As tough gigs go, I’m pretty close in mortality rates to those poor guys in the red uniforms in Star Trek who, in my view, should years ago have got together with the stormtroopers from Star Wars and formed some sort of protest movement, albeit a very short-lived one.
Consider the facts: in the Shattered Land trilogy, I accounted for over thirteen million poor fictional souls, including five significant Good Guys, both leading Bad Guys, and an unspecified number of alien beings – albeit that Bad Guys and aliens don’t generally count. I’ve probably been a bit less brutal in numeric terms in later books, but Sharkey certainly kept up the tradition of massacring named characters including in that case one after whom the book was actually named.
So why do we do it? Why do authors, having spent all that time creating a character, giving them hopes, fears, dreams, a childhood, love affairs, all that stuff, why do we then go and kill them off?
One reason, of course, is that it can be a starting-point for everything else. Death can be a trigger for all sorts of things in the living, such as a melancholy and allegedly amusing ghost story about two fading rockers (see my Last Great Radio Show)).
For another answer, we can turn to an expert: Death himself - who was, of course, the only character to appear in every one of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books (and never died, although he did retire at one point, with somewhat complex consequences):
“AH,” said Death. “DRAMA.”
Killing off a significant character is an immensely dramatic thing to do, which is why The Walking Dead usually takes about three episodes over it* and why British Soaps have lately embraced it to the extent that Weatherfield and Walford now have higher murder rates than Chicago.
* Not including flashbacks and occasional re-appearances in undead form.
It’s my belief that most readers don’t actually expect characters to die, because actually not a lot of writers do it; so it’s a splendid shock to spring on the punters when you do it. Face it, even Tolkein backed off from it, suddenly bringing back Gandalf in a blaze of light having previously despatched him into apparent oblivion at the hands of a Balrog (and, now I come to think of it, milked this for all it was bloody worth for about seventy pages thereafter). Tolkein did, of course, brush us off later with the actual death of Boromir in orc-intensive circumstances – and that without even knowing that the notoriously accident-prone Sean Bean was going to get the gig in the movie version – but Boromir, while nominally a Good Guy, was frankly a bit of a pain in the neck and didn’t have much of a role that one could see going forward.
Which brings me to the third reason for killing a character, which is that he or she might be surplus to requirements. In my current WIP, for instance, I introduced a number of characters at the beginning of the book, each of whom had a reasonably clear role. But, as the plot developed, it became clear that one of them didn’t actually have that much to do. From that moment on, he was doomed. I could, of course, have streamlined things by writing him out and giving his stuff to one of the other major characters – a technique I’ve deployed on numerous occasions – but if I’m being frank, I needed someone to get incinerated at some point and it provided a decent bit of drama at a point when the plot had otherwise gone a little quiet. Sorry if that seems a little heartless.
The fourth reason for a character death is what one might call the Damn Dumbledore Situation, which is that the character knows too damn much or is too damn powerful. Consider Dumbledore. For four books, he has been the all-powerful force for Good, who brings everything to a peaceful close at the end of the story. No matter what scrapes Harry and his friends get into, it is Dumbledore who eventually draws a line under things. The problem with this is that the reader then expects him to do it all the time. There comes a point in that series at which Harry has to stand on his own two feet and defeat the forces of darkness through his own efforts – otherwise it would be the Albus Dumbledore Series and national sales of round-rimmed spectacles might never have recovered from the shock.
Albus Dumbledore, poor chap. Doomed from the start.
I applied a broadly similar logic to the death of Olivie de Saint Vaulry at the end of The Falling Fire. Olivie knows what’s going on – at least to a greater extent to anyone else. She knows where all the bodies are hidden (the live ones, at any rate), she knows the nature of the talismans she designed; she is simply wised-up to a degree that the other characters are not. Which makes it difficult. If she’s still knocking around, then the other characters have nothing to do. The job of writing the third book in the series – already a fairly tortuous process – would have been rendered impossible. You can’t turn out two ninety-thousand word novels and then expect the punter to put up with a ten-thousand word finale in which some red-haired French girl finally comes clean about all the secrets she’s been keeping for the last six hundred pages and they all live happily ever after. No, the poor foot-soldiers have to find the important stuff out for themselves. Sometimes you have to get rid of a character in order to make things more difficult for the others – because, otherwise, you simply wouldn’t have a plot.
Do we mourn, we authors? Of course we do. I was devastated after writing Olivie’s death, even though I’d known it was going to happen more or less from minute one. Like JK Rowling, I’d had that scene written almost from the start: but when I actually put it into the book, it darn near killed me (in a manner of speaking). I was in floods after writing poor Albert Clamp’s final moments in Jerusalem, and I’m not even going to talk about how I felt after writing Old Sharkey’s last scene.
So are we tempted, just occasionally, to stay the axe? Cue a shuffling of feet and embarrassed muttering among the writers in the audience (if any of them are still left alive). Of course we are. We love these people. But, if we’ve any sense, we plough on. We know when they have to go. The best we can hope is that we’ve made the story we wanted to make as a result.
Mind you, if there’s an afterlife for fictional characters, and if I end up going there, well, I’m knackered. There’s going to be a hell of a lot of people out to get me.
Yours, looking nervously over his shoulder,
The Undersigned.