1 Your most-loved villain

OK, so thinking back, then, to the books that you’ve read in your life so far, who would you say are the most memorable villains that you’ve come across?

For me, the most memorable is Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. So psychologists distinguish between different types of memory, one of which is autobiographical, which is essentially what you put in your autobiography. And I would put Nurse Ratched in mine. She was very influential on me. So she is a nurse in a mental asylum in America in the ’60s. But she’s not bad. But she’s like a machine. She doesn’t listen. She just enacts bureaucracy. So for me, there was this terrible sense of injustice, that she wasn’t trying to help people. She was just trying to make them conform. So she really stuck in my memory and I think had quite an influence in my choice to become a psychologist, but then in my career to try to do something about situations that lead to Nurse Ratcheds.

Interesting. So mine is much more from-- drawn from early childhood. And my favourite villain is Rumpelstiltskin. And that is because I can’t understand why he’s so angry. I don’t really get his backstory. He gets involved in spinning gold. And he gets himself into a situation with a young girl, where he says that he’s going to take her firstborn child unless she can guess his name, which she eventually does. And he gets so angry that he puts his foot through the floor. And that was always such a memorable image for me, this idea of someone stamping their foot right through the floor. And one of the reasons I think I really like Rumpelstiltskin is I don’t understand his motivation at all, so found him quite fascinating. What about you?

Well, I suppose I would think about Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr Ripley, the novelist-- the novel by Patricia Highsmith. And initially, he’s, of course, extremely charming. And he worms his way into this group of friends because he’s really a good mimic. So he can almost mimic their mannerisms back to them, which, of course, is what leads him to bad doings as the novel continues. But it’s really how his initial charm turns to what becomes revealed as really a murderous intent. But however, he’s not the murderer without making mistakes. He continually makes mistakes, leading necessarily to further murders. And so the charm quickly wanes and you realise, gosh, he is dastardly.

So you mentioned his charisma there. In terms of the sort of villains that you feel most drawn to, perhaps not the most memorable, but are there particular villains that you’ve read about that you found almost attractive in some way?

Well, I suppose I think about the novel Misery by Stephen King, where Annie Wilkes is an ex-nurse. She finds the novelist Paul Sheldon after his horrendous car accident in snowy Colorado, takes him back to her home, nurses him with what you think is tender loving care. You might even think, gosh, maybe something could bloom between the two of them. She’s clearly a Paul Sheldon fan, although is she too much of a fan one begins to think. Because bit by bit, you realise, oh, dear, he’s actually her prisoner. Not only that, she makes him addicted to the painkilling drugs that she will only dole out when he writes the novel she wants him to write. And it goes from bad to worse.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, that sense of a gradual reveal of a character is quite similar with the one I’m most drawn to, which is Count Fosco in The Woman in White, which is written by Wilkie Collins. And Fosco is this unusual character. He’s very charming. He’s very sophisticated. People like him. Animals like him. And we’re always taught to trust anyone in a novel that animals like. They’re nearly always a good person. And yet, he turns out to be the arch manipulator behind the plot, really. He is the ultimate villain. But you only gradually start to realise that as the story goes along.

So you might be surprised by this. The one I’m really drawn to is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And it’s a gradual reveal there, too. Now, reading this in modern day, that’s surprising because the second you see Dracula, you know he’s a vampire. You know he’s evil. But read the book, and it’s revealed quite gradually. So it’s told through various devices, such as diary entries, newspaper entries, and ships’ logs and things like that. So we get one of the main character’s diaries at the start, who begins to suspect something’s up. And that suspicion grows and grows before there’s the full realisation of just how evil this character is. And he’s pure evil. One of the reasons I think so many people are drawn to Dracula is he’s inexcusably and completely evil. He speaks to a darkness within us that we wouldn’t dare give voice to. And particularly in Victorian England, where this is set, he represents the old mystic ways coming to-- literally coming to England and being exposed to science. He’s also the face of sexual desire compared to the societal norm in Victorian England that was a lot more button-down and repressed. He gives a face to these-- the darkness within us that we try to keep within us, which is why he’s so compelling.

Yeah. It’s fascinating, isn’t it, the reason that we feel drawn to these characters that we know are really awful?