It was an odd delight to have to choose a favourite villain in literature. Reading the choices made by fellow contributors has, to an extent, brilliantly confused rather than dully clarified my thoughts. Are we talking about the scope of their megalomania – a Sauron or an Ahab? Or is it the nastiness of their behaviour – a Patrick Bateman or a Humbert Humbert? Or is it the slyness of their villainy – Bertha from Jane Eyre or Mrs Danvers from Rebecca? Henry de Montherlant observed that “happiness writes in white ink on white paper”, and it’s certainly true that villainy thrills on the page in a manner decency struggles to realise.
The best villains, to my mind, are the ones most like us. Personally, I have no deep desire to dispatch with Sherlock Holmes, like Moriarty; bend the Universe to my will like Star Trek’s Khan Noonien Singh, the AntiMonitor, or oh-so-many others. So instead of inscrutable wickedness, personal vendetta, simple cruelty or being the Adversary of God, I choose Robert Wringhim from James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It’s only a slight cheat since whether or not his friend Gil-Martin is the Devil is the book’s horrific, troubling aporia.
Robert is the second son of the dissolute Laird of Dalcastle, though some suspect his real father is his mother’s Calvinist spiritual adviser, the Rev Wringhim. Overlooked, humiliated and righteously angry at his father’s behaviour, he is also pious, conflicted and serious. Like the elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son he keeps wondering “Lo these many years did I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy command; and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends.” It’s just one of Hogg’s brilliant inversions to make the younger son the one with the moral chip on his shoulder.
He stalks his brother in Edinburgh as he lives a roistering life, egged on by Gil-Martin, his mysterious friend who convinces him that if you are of the elect, no action you do can prevent you from going to heaven. His brother is stabbed. Robert is there. Is Gil-Martin? Well, the book tells everything twice. The modern editor narrates the story before presenting Robert’s own words, an autobiography found in his coffin. He is and he isn’t. He shimmers and evades. Is he a phantasm of Robert’s mind, a delusion created by religious fanaticism, or is he actually Auld Nick as we call him in Scotland?
Hogg’s astonishing choreography of the narratives means the reader is constantly unsettled by its central question: How does a good man become bad? Suffice to say, things do not end well for Robert. He becomes entangled in looms at one point, and this seems the most apposite image for this ambiguous, still-startling novel. Robert is a monster, but he becomes a monster. He is sincere while those around him are hypocrites. He knows there is something rotten in the state of Scotland, but his solutions are worse than the problems, if they are his at all.
