Happy couple? ... Richard Leech as Mr Rochester and Ann Bell as Jane Eyre. Photograph: Harry Todd/Getty

For today, I had intended to write a lightweight Friday blog about the characters in literature who we hate to love. However, I find myself rapidly backtracking in the light of Lindesay Irvine's bombshell that here on the books blog: "We pour high-minded scorn on this kind of hedge-trimming approach to literature." (No one told me!) Not to mention his trenchant argument that characters can't and perhaps shouldn't be removed from the work as a whole.

Of course, I'm not going to backtrack all that far. I love these list blogs, both as a way of getting tips for future reading (or indeed books to avoid) and for the clever way, somewhere around comment 63, posters manage to reroute them into learned discourses about entirely different, but invariably interesting subjects. A recent excursus from BillyMills about the "equilibrium that depends on variation over geological time" on a blog about "favourite words" springs to mind.

However, I do think that now, instead of just getting down to the nitty-gritty of the authorial creations we're supposed to like, but are actually as irritating as hell, I should at least try to defend my insistence on character and try to demonstrate that this isn't going to be an entirely pointless exercise.

Character is a vital aspect of criticism. Most effective literature is an emotional as much as an intellectual experience after all. It's the actors in the drama that generally form the focus for this emotion. What's more, our relationship with literary characters inevitably changes the texture of books and the way we view crucial scenes. In fact, it's precisely because - as Lindesay so neatly put it- they're "embedded in the weave of a text" that they should be singled out.

And, in case all that emotionalism is troubling all those who like to apply more rigorous aesthetic judgements to their appreciation of art, just consider the skill and human empathy needed to create a successful character. Anyone can write a bore. The magic lies in conjuring - with words alone - someone we can love.

However, that's not to say that the individuals in books that we don't warm to are necessarily artistic failures. Just as often, they are salutary reminders of just how subjective the appreciation of literature really is. I sometimes wonder, for instance, if a large part of my dislike for Thomas Hardy stems not so much from his deficiencies as a writer as from my personal objections to the personalities in his books, who I often find irritating, pathetic and needy. More recently, I based most of my objection to Edward Docx's skilfully written Booker long-listed Self Help around the fact that I didn't like the protagonists. I suspect I was wrong to do so.

In fact, it was this Booker Club post that first put the idea of bad characters in good books into my head - or more specifically, it was a comment on it by christopherhawtree who brought up the idea of "characters in fiction with whom no one would care to spend much, if any time, however pleasing they are on the page" (thank you!). His nomination was Fielding in A Passage to India: "A good man but I can imagine that he would get annoying if one had to listen to everything he says without the confines of his allotted space within those 300 pages of a great novel."

My immediate thought was Jane Austen's Emma, the threat of whose presence in real life would have me running for the hills, even after she's done the right thing and married the chap with the strong jawline, and no matter how many aphorisms she might come up with. I also recalled that the most disappointing thing about the end of The Lord of the Rings for me wasn't all that boring guff about elves floating away on grey ships, it was Tolkien's regretful failure to capitalise on a golden opportunity to throw the perpetually pale and whinging Frodo into the fires of Mount Doom along with the ring.

I'm also pretty certain that the prospect of a lifetime with Jane Eyre would have me eyeing up the attic as a very pleasant place to go insane in, and sometimes think that Sophie's sad end in William Styron's classic 1972 novel wasn't a rather sensible way of avoiding life with the self-obsessed Stingo.

Finally, delicacy dictates that I don't say too much about the ego-maniacal Jesus. You've heard enough from me anyway. It's over to you. Who do you not like? And, since Lindesay Irvine's compelled me to engage with some fairly big issues, does it matter?