You don’t look a day older
September 24, 2011
Ken Branagh as a middle-agedWallander
Swedish novelist Henning Mankell recently called a halt to his mega-bestselling Inspector Wallander series with the novel The Troubled Man. According to an interview that Mankell gave to the BBC’s World Book Club, Wallander is now aged over 60 and is brooding over his life. “I let Wallander look backwards to see ‘What did I do with my life?’, and for him it is a bit difficult. But then he remembers certain things that had an enormous impact on him, and one of them is what I spoke about in the first novel.” That first novel was Faceless Killers, published in 1991.
It seems to make sense that Wallender, like his creator, should have aged as the series progresses – novels are supposed to be about characters who develop, and readers who follow the whole series have the pleasure of seeing the inspector gradually mature as the result of his experiences. But it’s not always the case that popular fictional characters get older from book to book. Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot, for example, first appeared in 1926 in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which he was described as a retired police detective. The final Poirot novel that Christie wrote was Elephants Can Remember, published in 1972. If Poirot had aged during the intervening five decades, he would presumably have been over 100 years old by this time. In fact he seems to get no older from one book to the next.
The same applied to my favourite fictional character when I was a boy – Richmal Crompton’s Just William. William is eleven years old in the first book, set in the 1920s, with a house full of servants. He is still eleven all the way through the 30s, the Second World War, the 50s, becomes interested in the space program in the 60s, and even bumps into members of a pop group in the 1970s, still aged eleven.
Characters who remain the same age throughout their adventures are not only in defiance of the laws of time and space, they also flout the convention that fictional characters are supposed to develop and learn from their experiences. William never becomes any more cautious or well behaved after 50 years of naughtiness, and of course readers would not want him to.
J.K. Rowling, on the other hand, allowed Harry Potter to grow up from the age of the age of 11 in the first book to 17 in the last, ageing by one year every book (he jumps forward to the age of 30 in the final section). The fact that Harry grows up during the series, learning and developing new qualities along the way, is part of the appeal of the series and an essential part of its narrative drive, as without the powers he has developed Harry would be unable to take part in the final battle with Voldemort.
The decision about whether to allow a recurring character to grow older or not is a tricky one for authors. If the character stays the same, the readers are required to suspend their disbelief as a character maintains a Dorian Gray-like imperviousness to time, and any references to real historical events are fraught with danger, as they are almost certain to expose chronological inconsistencies.
On the other hand, if the character does get older, the writer has to decide how quickly they will age. Will the character age roughly in accordance with real time, as Wallander has done? If your second book is published ten years after the first and has the same protagonist, must the character be ten years older? In that case, the writer only has a certain window in which the books can be written – if Mankell decides to write more Wallander in ten years’ time, the inspector will have to be 70 years old, or the novel will have to be set in the past, or Mankell will have to change the rules.
This is a real dilemma for writers. If your first novel contained references to actual historical events and specific years, and then a number of years later you are writing another novel featuring the same character, you have to decide how consistent you are going to be. If you’d prefer to avoid constantly cross-checking from book to book, perhaps it’s better to include as few time- specific events as possible. But that means expunging references to events in the real world, which makes for a loss of realism.
It’s not just a problem of continuity and story logic. It’s tempting to take the Christie- Crompton route of allowing characters to ignore the passing of time. However, it’s much richer from a narrative point of view to have characters like Wallander who grow wiser and develop as a result of their adventures. If they are wiser, then presumably they are also older, ergo …
If you’ve given your character an age and named a year in the first book, then later books can be problematic. Perhaps the most pragmatic course is to shut up about your character’s age, avoid any time-specific markers, and hope no one is paying attention too closely to these matters.
