How To Love A Bad Boy

One of the problems I have faced in writing this novel is very simply this: Publius Clodius Pulcher was an absolute turd.

This is problematic since, as anybody who has studied the "science" of writing knows, readers are supposed to be able to empathise or sympathise with the narrators or main characters of novels. It's hard to drum up sympathy for someone as extreme and amoral as Clodius. I could take refuge in the "loveable cad" trope, and cash in on what I think of as "Flashman syndrome" - a belief that readers can learn to love an unpleasant character if he brings a certain style and panache to his unpleasantness, but I suspect that Clodius would test this paradigm to destruction. Flashman was a cad - but Clodius was an utter bastard.

The only way around this, I decided, was to regard the whole thing as a tragedy - the story of someone who could have been better, but who was dragged by circumstances and society down the path of darkness (think of Euripides' Medea - "I know the better course and I approve it; and yet I choose the worse.") . Since I do not believe that anybody is wholly bad, I decided that I should give my Clodius some redeeming features, something for the reader to hold on to, some potential for improvement or "salvation". My main 'redeeming features' are:

- His growing love for his wife Fulvia (see my previous post on this).

- A genuine and deep concern for his blood relatives. This, I think, is historicalluy justifiable since, as a member of the aristocratic gens Claudii, Clodius would have had reverence for his family hammered into his head from a very early youth (something I dwell on, perhaps excessively, in Chapter 1). I think that, in the context of this type of education, it's not implausible that, for instance, he would want to protect his sisters, or that he would feel grief at his father's death. And this can help to partially redeem him in readers' eyes.

- Humour. Readers will forgive a lot of outrageous behaviour if it is presented in a self-aware and humorous manner. I try to let Clodius' wit come out in his bitter asides and reflections on the experience he narrates.

These (and a few other potentially sympathetic traits) are intended to give the reader grounds for hope - can Clodius somehow hang onto these humanising qualities and rise above the horrific spiral of violence that whirls around him? The tragedy of the book, I hope, is that ultimately he cannot. The violence gradually consumes him, and we are forced to watch as every human quality is stripped from him and he becomes more and more monstrous.

Hey, I never said it would be a cheerful read!