I recently read Pulse, by Felix Francis, who, over the past couple of decades, has stepped into the shoes of his father Dick Francis, as the writer of thrillers centered around the British horse racing industry.
(Fair warning: this post started off as a calm discussion about heroic and non-heroic protagonists, and their differing roles in a story, and turned into a rant about the differences between male and female ‘everyman’ protagonists.)
Francis the elder was a master of the heroic everyman. Almost all of his heroes were white British men between 5’10 and 6 feet, mostly normal white-collar jobs and background, basically apolitical, late twenties or early thirties- experienced enough to get the job done but young enough that they weren’t likely to keel over from a heart attack while doing it. The books almost always had a love interest of some kind, a family with varying levels of wackiness, and a level of danger sufficient to make the hero step up and fight for himself or his loved ones without scaring off the readers.
These everymen were tough SOBs, even if they didn’t always know it at the start of the book. Just off the top of my head, Andrew Douglas from The Danger gets handcuffed to tree in the wilderness and has to dig it up with his bare hands to get free. I don’t remember the details, but he might also be sans any clothes or shoes by that point. Alexander Kinloch from To the Hilt gets grilled- literally, to the tune of first, second, and third-degree burns- to make him give up information (he doesn’t, and is rescued in time). Those two stick out in my mind because they’re on the far end of the toughness scale, but none of their fellows are too far behind them.
Now, are those heroes truly realistic? Probably not, if only because most of them (but not all!) are white-collar workers (Andrew is a hostage negotiator and Al is a painter) and have no reason to be in as good a physical shape as they are, and a real-life version wouldn’t be able to pull off the physical challenges they face. But they are relatable, and the writing is good enough that most people think they’re realistic. And as part of their everyman heroism, they were generally good role models. Not perfect, but they were clever, strong in the face of adversity, loved their wives/girlfriends and their kids, and decently masculine; they were what a man should be, and if you removed the specifically masculine traits, they were what a person should be, regardless of gender.
The ‘hero’ of Pulse is different, and not in a good way. And it didn’t help that the book started off with a bait-and-switch; the POV character (they’re all written in first person) is named Chris and is an emergency room doctor who struggles with depression and its many and varied knock-on effects. That’s fine, except when I got most of the way through chapter one and Chris was suddenly concerned about early menopause.
Say what?
Yep. After thirty-something books with male protagonists, they switched. And waited to the end of the first chapter to tell anyone; Christine is called by her nickname or ‘Dr. Rankin’ by her colleagues, there’s no pronouns in the blurb, and because it’s in first person, she of course refers to herself as ‘I’.
I can get over that switch, though I was honestly really interested to read about a male protagonist who was dealing with diagnoseable mental health issues in ways typical of Francis heroes, because it’s less common in fiction.
But Chris is not a hero or even an everyman protagonist- or at least, she shouldn’t be. She tries to self-medicate with illegal drugs, has an eating disorder and denies it (realistic, but not something you want in a hero), attempts suicide, spends time in a mental hospital as a patient, not a clinician, and refuses to let go of a mystery that’s not her business despite being warned off by the police, the race track officials, the villains, and basically everyone she talks to. She hides useful information from the police, only to dangle it over their heads when she wants something. She doesn’t tell her ex-Army intelligence husband what’s going on- if anybody could help with a quiet investigation, you’d think he could- and when she’s in over her head and he finds out, she refuses to let him protect her (fortunately for my sanity, he gets his own heroic moment at the end). She lies to her husband about her whereabouts when she’s in danger, and suspects him of cheating on her for absolutely no reason. She’s worried about her teenage kids’ safety, but not enough to actually do the things that would keep them out of danger.
Honestly, if Felix Francis was trying to make her a microcosm of all the things people hate about ‘normal’ modern women, what would be different?
And it’s all very obvious. Previous Francis heroes did dodgy things to make the plot work, sometimes working around the police instead of with them, poking their noses into things that they should’ve left alone- some of that stuff is necessary in this kind of book. But it was always downplayed slightly, not shouted to readers as something righteous that they should emulate. Chris is constantly justifying her actions by saying that doing all this crazy, unethical, and illegal stuff gives her a purpose and makes her feel better.
To be somewhat fair, Chris is a reasonably realistic portrayal of a person struggling with mental health issues. And such characters can be interesting protagonists. But coming on the heels of fifty years of heroic protagonists, it’s a bit of a letdown. ‘Betrayal’ is too strong a word- it’s only fiction, after all- but the switch from heroes to protagonists evokes those kinds of emotions, when I and other readers should be rooting for Chris instead of wanting to see her fail.
Every one of her heroic moments is robbed of its heroism by her subsequent actions, in a pattern so consistent that I only believe it’s accidental because I can’t believe a writer would knowingly do that to their protagonist.
She is resourceful in a crisis- at the climax, she’s forcibly overdosed on cocaine by the villains, and manages to counter the effects using the contents of the racetrack’s first aid kit. Pretty cool stuff. Then she packs up a bunch of the drugs and goes off to turn the tables on one of the villains. No, really; she walks up to him and hits him with an overdose of morphine while he’s giving a speech in front of a bunch of wealthy race horse owners. Then tries to claim self-defense when she’s rightly arrested. She gets off scot-free, because she’s ‘the hero’, and the paramedics were able to save the villain/victim.
At the end, when one of the villains is at her mercy and suffering from a massive brain injury, she renders first-aid, as she should. Look!- a heroic moment! But did she really have to self-righteously proclaim, “I’m a doctor; I save lives,” when her husband is understandably ambivalent about whether the villain- who’s repeatedly tried to murder his wife and kids– lives or dies?
Writers of the audience- don’t do this to your characters. Don’t leave the reader wishing the character had failed to achieve his goal. Don’t encourage the reader to dream wistfully of ways they might reach into the book and strangle the righteous idiot who claims to be the hero of this mess. And especially don’t make your ‘hero’ into a perfect negative stereotype of modern women.
Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I need a palate cleanser. What have you read lately that features positively-portrayed everyman heroes? Bonus points if they’re female, recently published, and/or in a contemporary setting. Please, convince me that modern female characters aren’t all like Christine Rankin from Pulse.
Mad Genius Club 
17 responses to “Heroes vs. Protagonists”
Mary Stewart’s main characters are everywoman heroines. They are moral and competent. I don’t get the bonus points for her being recently published, I know.
I love Mary Stewarts thrillers for that. Her heroines are clever, resourceful and–most emphatically–NOT girlbosses (ie, basically the worst kind of male character, in female guise)
…waitwaitwait. She renders the first aid to one of the villains because she “saves lives” WHEN SHE JUST TRIED TO MURDER ANOTHER ONE OF THEM?!?!
Even setting aside all the other crap, that alone would make me wall the book. (Also one of my number one gripes with the (pre complete suck, so Nine thru Twelve) Doctor in Doctor Who. The rest of it is fun, so I didn’t give up on the series–then–but the Doctor was a *howling* hypocrite and the writers–at least until they got to the latter end of Eleven and Twelve–never seemed to twig to that.)
I loathe the modern trend of a “flawed, realistic” character meaning that they are inevitably some level of a**hole, selfish, morally questionable for all the wrong reasons, and just generally unlikeable–in large part because they never truly attempt to overcome their flaws, they just whine about it and justify their bad behavior. Says *way* more about the people the writer hangs out with (or actually is themselves) than anything else, and it ain’t flattering.
I really like Summer’s End by John Van Stry. The main character is a former gang member fresh out of engineering school but, “Not exactly an ‘A’ student.” To get off Earth in a hurry, he takes the first job available, as junior engineer on an old corporate freighter.
He succeeds by working and improving himself, gaining practical skills and passing various spacer certification exams. The crew, women and men alike, are competent, experienced, and supportive so long as he pulls his weight. Some of them have a few odd things in their past…
Thanks for the prod. That book has been languishing in my to-be-read pile on my ereader, and you’ve just elevated it to “next”.
Ditto. I didn’t think I was going to buy hero gangbanger but Mr. Van Stry sells it. Note to self I think book three is out. Would totally recommend. OTOH Ms. Grant is looking for female characters just to cleanse her palate from that hack of a book that is Pulse. I can’t think of anything I’ve read more recently than The Dabare Snake Launcher (and that’s an ensemble thing) with female characters that aren’t bats. So I’m looking also.
Er… I don’t see any other books in that “series” (besides Summer’s End).
(…Now that I’m almost done with it. Yes, it’s a good Heinleinian read.)
I was thinking of his Wolfhounds series which now that I look is up to four books.
I hate the modern trend of “flawed, realistic character” = selfish, morally questionable in ALL the wrong ways, hypocritical to the max, and just generally deeply unlikeable–especially as they never actually try to overcome their flaws, they just whine and justify their crappy behavior. Basically, they are the good guy because the writer tells us so, despite ALL evidence to the contrary. (A nasty form of grey-goo Mary Sue.) It says far more about the writer and the kind of people they associate with than anything else, and it ain’t flattering.
Sounds like this “Chris” character is a prime example. Smugly moralizing about being a doctor, and doctors save lives…when apparently a few chapters earlier was straight up trying to MURDER someone??
This was also my biggest complaint about modern Doctor Who. The Doctor is a *howling* hypocrite regarding killing/violence. I put up with it for quite awhile–the rest of it was still fun, up to the end of the Twelfth Doctor’s run–but it’s now fallen entirely into wokeism and is dead to me. But any time the writers had the Doctor moralizing about how violence is bad*, how DARE you try to wipe out these attackers (usually the single most genocidal bunch of aliens in the universe, mind you–and one the Doctor himself erased once already), etc, I’d roll my eyes so hard I’d have to fish them out from under the couch. And I’d remind myself that this is a BRITISH show, and we all know how the UK feels about self defense nowadays (even all the way back in 2005).
*Twelve was actually something of an exception to this. With him, they finally had the Doctor acknowledging that yeah, he’d fought in a major war–and he was the one who ended it for the sake of saving the rest of the universe, and he was finally more or less over “and woe is me” and said “Yeah, and I’d do it again–I’d still hate myself for doing it, but I’d do it again if I had to.” And that was why his impassioned anti-war speech in one of the two parters actually WORKED. He wasn’t moralizing, he was saying “I’ve been there, and it’s awful, and in the end it didn’t matter, so PLEASE try to find a better solution before you try slaughtering each other.
Sadly, they turned around and undid all that character development by having the female Doctor be a stupid, ridiculous caricature, and going downhill as fast as they could from there.
I think you’re the first person I’ve run across who was fairly pro-Twelve; the couple of Whovians I know in real life were kind of down on his run for whatever reason.
My beef with a lot of modern fiction is that they take the zero to hero thing way too literally – they think the protagonist has to be completely worthless to have any room for growth, when all it
Twelve actually became one of my all time favorite Doctors. Ten had originally been my favorite (I’d seen classic Who as a small child on PBS, so while I was familiar with most of the prior Doctors–Four and Five especially–the new Who run was what I was most familiar with), but he was the worst of the new-Who hypocrite Doctors, the way they wrote him. I really liked Twelve–he was fun, he was at once a bit harder than his previous incarnations and more compassionate, and more from a “I’ve been where you are, so avoid my mistakes” attitude than previous, where before he’d been a bit more “I’m smarter than everyone else, I know it, and I’m gonna beat you over the head with it.” I *loved* his father/daughter relationship with Bill, and his storyline(s) with Missy. (Missy was how you gender swapped a major Time Lord character and made it WORK. I don’t know why they couldn’t have given Thirteen that good of writing.) And, of course, Peter Capaldi is as massive a Who fanboy as David Tennant is (and for longer, since he’s older), and I found his portrayal to be very passionate and dedicated as a result. There were some real stinkers of episodes here and there (there always were) particularly the Robin Hood one, but I felt like after they went to Thirteen they were being SO cautious (Oh, no, we can’t have any bad episodes, they’ll blame the actress) that they went full boring, and I disliked how silly and stupid Jodie Whittaker played Thirteen overall. Too childish, not enough of the Doctor’s necessary weight of years and relative menace to enemies.
I have a protagonist sort-of-hero in my Luna City series. His main problem at the start is that he is an arrogant, spoiled self-centered a-hole because he has been stuck for a decade or more as a teenager. It’s only when he basically has a breakdown, and winds up running a little cafe in a small town that he begins to grow up, and develop into a responsible, mature human being. His maturing happens over the course of the series.
Ahh, but he has an actual character arc and becomes a better person!
Somehow, the ones like I was describing never actually change. We’re just expected to “accept them as they are” and consider them the heroes…
I just finished The Danger today. Another great point about that book is that our hero is able to admire other competent people, thus creating the background sense that the world is a place where the good guy is not alone in his battle against evil.
Dick Francis was awesome. I am happily going through a major re-read, and finding many I didn’t get to in my teens.
Doscher’s Vixen War Bride series has good and competent heroes. They’re professional soldiers, so I’m not sure they qualify as an “everyman.” But the series is a great read!
Felix Francis is a sub-par continuation of his father Dick Francis’s legacy, and it is in just these areas of protagonist that he fails most reliably. A few of his are readable, but most are not. You can tell that he is a member of a different generation.
Pied Piper by Nevil Shute
https://a.co/d/8u3AB82
The protagonist is a hero, though he didn’t realize it at the start.
At least some of Dick Francis’s protagonists were former jockeys, so below average height for men and possibly more blue collar backgrounds. Or so I thought, I’d have to revisit them.
I just finished Sole Survivor (not Dean Koontz’s best work), and the hero there, a former crime beat reporter consumed by anger and grief over the loss of his family, is pretty everymannish, although his coping mechanisms are annoying at times.