Dr Evil

There’s a type of good vs evil Hollywood film where the protagonist ends up struggling with the top bad guy on a wet rooftop, or similar. Inevitably, they both have guns but for some reason contrive to lose them, so they end up beating each other up with fists and conveniently-lying-around metal poles instead. Then it looks like the good guy is about to lose. (Oh, no! He’s hanging one handed from the balustrade, dangling over a 200 ft drop! Now he must surely die!) Then the good guy pulls out some good-guy trick, and it’s the bad guy who falls instead.

If there’s a deputy good-guy (often a woman), then the rules say that the deputy good-guy has to have some deputy-battle with a deputy bad-guy. That battle needs to be a bit less dramatic than the main battle, because we can’t take too much light away from the Big Good Guy.

All those rules are annoyingly predictable, but they’re also annoyingly essential. You can’t end an action movie without real action; that would just be disappointing. Likewise, that action can’t be tame compared with what’s just gone before. And a show-down with darkness needs to have jeopardy. Bruce Willis needs to have a one-to-one, jeopardy-rich battle with Alan Rickman. He can’t just come in with a troop of armed sharp-shooters and say, ‘You’re stuffed, mate.’

But that’s Hollywood. And Hollywood can only do exteriors. Its battles have to be played out on rooftops, because they can’t play out in the mind.

What about books?

And here – well, it’s complicated.

One, perfectly fine, model for books follows that Hollywood script exactly. Mounting jeopardy and action. The antagonist personified in one very clear figure. A big biff-wham-bam climax, that’s essentially one vs one. Goody wins.

That works. If that’s the model for your book, it’s fine.

But there are alternative models and they work too:

Multiple protagonists

My first book had three brothers racing to make a million pounds, as a way to win their dead father’s considerable fortune.

The brothers included a good guy, a bad guy who sought to reform, and a guy who stayed bad until the epilogue. There was also a good sister who snuck in at the very last minute to scoop the jackpot. There wasn’t really a clear antagonist here. There were moral stakes in play, of course, but never of the rooftop battle sort. The bad brother who lost his money was punished only by returning to do a philosophy degree in Oxford. Throwing him off a rooftop would have been vastly excessive.

In the end, the book didn’t have a true antagonist at all. It just had actors of different moral weights who secured outcomes in proportion to those weights. Yes, you need some kind of high-intensity climax, but that climax doesn’t have to have violence of any sort. Mine didn’t.

Antagonist as external but impersonal force

Another one of my books was a romance where the couple met during the Russian revolution, were separated by war and revolution, and found each other again in 1945-era Berlin. There was never truly a single-individual antagonist. Really, the antagonist was the evil of two dark empires in conflict. But obviously that evil needed to act out via incident and character so, yes, there was a crucial intervention made by a Bad Guy that looked set to separate those two lovers forever.

But that Bad Guy wasn’t critical, the way that the Alan Rickman character was. He was simply a mechanical way to deliver an ‘Oh, no, everything’s ruined’ climax to the story. It’s not just that he personally didn’t need to be thrown off a roof. He shouldn’t be thrown off the roof. He wasn’t the problem. The system was.

The climax had no violence at all. The release was that the woman, trapped inside the dark Soviet system, found a means of escape. The real evil – Soviet Russia – was still alive, still unconquered; it’s just that this one person amongst millions managed to get out.

Antagonist as personal but unseen force

With crime novels, it’s obviously commonplace for there to be a bad guy – but with no one knowing who he is. You can tell there’s darkness at work, because there’s a litter of corpses, but the whole task for the detective is figuring out who that person is.

I’ve written novels where the bad guy is firmly identified and arrested at the end of the book. In most cases, that final moment doesn’t involve real violence. In one book, for example, Fiona has figured out that some dodgy monks are at fault, and just waits, peacefully, with her police colleagues outside the monastery’s church, waiting for the service to end before arresting the villains. No drama, not even shouting.

But I’ve also written novels where the bad guy eludes capture: the reader sees a shape fleeing on a hillside, but that shape is never named. Some lower-level villains may have been demolished, but the ultimate bad guy escapes. It’s easier to write that kind of book in a series novel, but you could just about get away with something similar even in a standalone.

Antagonist as purely personal force

And, in romances perhaps most of all, the antagonist can live within the protagonist themselves. Who’s the antagonist in Pride and Prejudice? It’s not Wickham: he’s just a plot device. Throwing him off a roof would feel like an accidental coda to the main book. Entertaining, but hardly necessary.

In the end, the only antagonists that Lizzie and Darcy face are their own shortcomings. They can’t find love until they’ve conquered the devils lurking within them both. That kind of book needs more careful writing than the chuck-em-off-roofs kind, but those work too, even today.

***

I’m not sure that the list above is a complete taxonomy of ways-to-handle-antagonists. And, anyway, I’m not sure it matters. What really matters is the protagonist’s (and reader’s) inner journey. Do they have an ‘oh no, everything’s lost’ moment? Do they have a thrill of victory? Is the hero morally tested? Is there a real, proper climax, suited to the tone of the book?

If you deliver those things properly, I’m sure your antagonist is fine. I mean – thrown-off-a-roof-and-thoroughly-splatted, yes – but fine in an editorial way.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / The Beast in Black

250-300 words please – where we see your antagonist in action. By all means give us a section from your climax if that works, but it’s also fine to just show your antagonist at his/her wicked worst. If you have an impersonal type antagonist – the Soviet empire – for example – show a scene where we feel its dark presence. If you only have an inner antagonist, then give us a passage which shows that struggle.

Also, if you do end up throwing your Baddie off a roof, then please please please can we see that? (I’ve never thrown a bad guy off a roof, but I did bundle one off a cliff once. Excerpt below. Still one of my favourite climax-moments.)

When you are ready, post in the Townhouse forum.

Til soon.

Harry