Hard to imagine

I have a problem with novels that other people don't seem to have. I find it very hard to conjure up a vivid mental picture of the characters. Even if I read a description of someone several times, they remain words on the page and I get no clear image of them. I can summon up a stereotype of an old man or a young woman or a gurgling baby, but nothing more specific.

Most people seem to conjure up characters in their head quite easily. They have a very haunting image of the person, almost as vivid as someone in real life. They know exactly what Elizabeth Bennet or Jay Gatsby or Jane Eyre look like, while I have no such image.

If I have a vivid picture of someone, it's only because I've seen them in drawings or films - like Miss Marple, Frankenstein's Monster, Oliver Twist or Winnie the Pooh. I may know what they look like even if I haven't read the book - like Harry Potter.

It's frustrating because I feel I'm not really enjoying a book fully, I'm not totally immersed in it, if I can't picture the characters in my head. I can follow the plot and know what's going on, but there's something missing. It's like being in a very bare room with only a few sticks of furniture.

I guess I just have an inability to translate words into a visual image. They remain words and for some reason don't fire up my imagination as they should.

I'd love to see novels that have illustrations of all the main characters. I seem to remember that being a common practice when I was young (in Dickens for instance), but somewhere along the line they got dropped.

Enough already

I like novels that focus on one or two characters and explore their lives and personal-ities in great detail. I get to know them so well they become extremely vivid, almost flesh and blood, and I can really get to love them or hate them.

Novels with too many characters drive me nuts. Firstly I can't keep track of them and I have to keep reminding myself who is who, who's related to who, who's shagging who, who does what job, who died, who has a nasty illness, and so on till I'm thoroughly confused. It doesn't help that I have a memory like a sieve and will forget the character on page 51 once I'm on page 52.

Secondly, when there are so many characters you never get to know them in any depth. They flit in and out and often are little more than shallow caricatures. You know the sort of thing - Jim the controlling husband, Karen the timid wife and their two children, truculent Simon and well-behaved Tessa.

And once they become caricatures, it's hard to tell them apart. Is this uncle one, uncle two or uncle three? They're all grumpy, opinionated and doddery. Which is which?

So why do authors flood their books with so many characters? One author, Anne R Allen, confesses: "One of my personal writing issues is I tend to pack my books and stories with way too many characters. If a fascinating person walks into one of my stories, I feel it would be rude not to let them join the party. This drives my editors batty. They think confusing the reader is worse than being rude to fictional people. And of course they're right."

Right now I'm re-reading Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood. I love it precisely because it centres on one person - Rennie - and tells you more and more about her.

Rennie sticks in my mind. Not so, uncle three.

Cringeworthy

When a movie or TV sitcom depicts someone as a bit hopeless - awkward, dim-witted, socially inept, accident-prone etc - I might cringe a bit, I might want to stop looking, but mainly I just find it amusing. Yet a lot of people find such scenes so embarrassing they can't bear it and have to stop watching.

They empathise with the person so much that it's actually painful to go on watching. Even if it's pure fiction, and not real life, they can't endure it. I gather it's called second-hand embarrassment.

I think it rather depends how far the ineptness goes. If it's just a few seconds of awkwardness, it's endearing. But if the person is persistently seen as Harriet Hopeless, and everything she does goes wrong, then it gets embarrassing and cringeworthy and I'd rather not watch it.

But I've never been so deeply affected that watching becomes painful. That suggests an amazing degree of empathy and identifying.

Which leads to the question, does popular entertainment rely too much on ridiculing people, wheeling on the classic bumbling halfwit, the resident figure of fun?

I don't think so. After all, we're talking about fictional characters, people we can laugh at with impunity. When we meet such characters in everyday life, of course we treat them with the appropriate tact and tolerance. Or should do.

The fact is hopeless characters are funny. There's something about them stumbling around in confusion that's amusing, for all sorts of reasons. They reflect our own insecurities about screwing things up. They're vulnerable. They're endearing. We want to help them out. And they're more interesting than people who get everything right.

It's no accident that the most popular person in Fawlty Towers has always been Manuel, the clueless Spanish waiter who never knows if he's coming or going and can't understand anything Basil says to him.

I certainly have my own streak of awkwardness and social ineptness. But that's another story.