Risingshadow has the honour of publishing a guest post by William Sutton. This guest post is part of the Seven Sins Blog Tour.
William Sutton comes from Dunblane, Scotland. He has written for The Times and the Fortean Times, acted in the longest play in the world, and played cricket for Brazil. His first novel is a Victorian mystery of a gleaming metropolis mired in corruption.
He writes for international magazines about language, music and futurology. His plays have been produced on radio and in London fringe theatres. He has performed at events from the Edinburgh Festival to High Down Prison, often with a ukulele. He teaches Latin and plays accordion with chansonnier Philip Jeays.
Click here to visit his official website.
Seven Sinful Blogs: Envy (Guest post by William Sutton)
William Sutton is author of Lawless and the Flowers of Sin, published by Titan Books. To celebrate, he’s writing Sinful Blogs with my take on the state we’re in (especially novelists).
Envy: Competition, Coercion, Collusion
Envy. An underrated sin, I commend it to novelists everywhere.”
Envy makes for wonderful novels. I commend it thoroughly to any writer.
Envy drives enemies together, pulls friends apart, warps relationships, divides countries. It fixates on love, family, money, possessions, or a whole life.
Envy is thus a most excellent plot engine.
Unequal friendships feature in many of my favourite novels. There are novels narrated by a sidekick, a right-hand man or a minor character, where the main character is beatified or idealised or aggrandised in a way that neither a third person narrative nor an autobiographical style can manage.
The Great Gatsby does it beautifully, but you’ll notice it also from Wuthering Heights to Fight Club, from Paul Auster’s novels back to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Nick Carraway admires Gatsby from a distance, marvelling at his superhuman stature and his enviable vivacity. It is only as the layers of the onion are unpeeled that we realise Gatsby is also envious. He is envious of Daisy’s husband Tom, who has the girl he should have had. He was so envious of that comfortable world of the rich that he has stopped at nothing to get into it. And maybe, just maybe, his love for Daisy is not so perfectly spotless as I always wanted to believe, but rather a skewed refraction of a poor boy’s dazzlement in the searchlights of wealth.
In Heart of Darkness, Marlow builds up his amazed portrait of Kurtz from afar. In Fight Club, Tyler Durden is seen from rather closer, but he still has that elusive ineffability, bolstered by the first rule of Fight Club...
This shape of envy I used in my first novel Lawless & the Devil of Euston Square. Our narrator, Sergeant Lawless, grows to admire the man he is chasing; but he also realises that this elusive Berwick Skelton is driven by his sense of exclusion, disenfranchisement, marginalisation and – in a word – envy.
Watson writing of Holmes.
Wooster reporting Jeeves.
Bunny telling of Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, the underrated third man of this triumvirate of fin de siècle proto-superheroes both written by cricketers and named after cricketers.
One way to create a superman is to have their best friend tell you how wonderful they are.
The tellers of these tales react in varied ways. Nick Carraway retains a warmth for Gatsby even when his constructed world has fallen to pieces, its shoddy workmanship exposed. Watson and Jeeves may be exasperated but all is excused when their saviour comes up trumps.
In Paul Auster’s Leviathan (as in The Locked Room, last in the New York Trilogy), the narrator’s best friend is also his rival, and outdoes the narrator at every turn. So when this exasperatingly successful friend vanishes, who is there to step into his shoes other than the narrator? What better aim can envy have than to steal the life you envy. In Leviathan, Peter Aaron takes over Ben Sachs’ novels, his family, his whole life.
Another underrated novel is Iain Banks’ Complicity which raises envy between best friends to a manipulative and murderous pitch.
Oscar Wilde enjoys playing with envy too. In The Portrait of Dorian Gray, it is Dorian’s intoxication with Sir Henry Wotton and his hedonistic aura that leads him into dark ways. Wilde played with similar relationships in his exquisite story A Portrait of Mr W.H.
This is the kind of twisted envy I’m playing with in my second novel Lawless and the Flowers of Sin. Lawless envies his Scotland Yard colleague Jeffcoat, favoured with the best cases; but this melts away in uncovering together the dog-eat-dog cartels of London’s exploitation networks.
Frankenstein’s monster of his master; Pip of Stella and Herbert in Great Expectations; in Wuthering Heights too many envious threads to disentangle.
Envy. An underrated sin, I commend it to novelists everywhere.
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