Six For Sunday - Favourite Characters from Series

This post if part of Six for Sunday run by Steph @alittlebutalot. I thought the prompt for today sounded interesting – it is six favourite characters from series.

It took me some time to think of mine, but here they are:

Belinda Weber – Posy Simmonds’ Mrs Weber’s Diary, Pure Posy, Mustn’t Grumble….

Belinda is the rebel daughter of George and Wendy Weber – but she’s a rather unusual rebel, rejecting her parents’ alternative lifestyle for one of money, glamour and rich boyfriends who are Something in the City. Where Wendy favours wholefoods, sandals, Laura Ashley skirts and street parties in the Webers' very Guardian-reader part of North London, Belinda runs around town on motorbikes with men called Nigel and Rupert. She wears short skirts and leather jackets and would rather starve than eat one of Wendy’s lentil quiches. Despite this, the women still come together over shared angst. I love her.

Kenneth Widmerpool – Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (twelve books in total)

Widmerpool is a fascinating character, mocked and derided at Eton for his middle class ways and lack of prowess both in the classroom and on those famous playing fields, but thereafter forever turning up in narrator Nick Jenkins’ life, and in increasingly successful, powerful, and often mysterious, roles. For me he will always be Simon Russell Beale, who played him in the exceptional 1997 television adaptation; I don’t think anyone else could capture this strange man’s character so well.

Commissario Brunetti - Donna’s Leon’s Death at La Fenice, The Anonymous Venetian, Acqua Alta, and many more

Guido Brunetti is the antithesis of most modern fictional detectives. He is well dressed (he is after all Italian), educated (he has a degree in Classics and still reads them every evening, often while sitting on the balcony of his apartment with its distant view of the mountains) and happily married. His wife, Paola, is a university lecturer who doesn’t brook any nonsense, they live contentedly with their two children, and although Brunetti has his run-ins with his boss, he gets on with his colleagues and is professional in his work, generally sticking to police procedure. I love this series most for the insight it gives us into everyday life in Venice. Leon, an American, has lived there for many years, so she is excellent on the small details that make things so real – the quietness, especially at night, when only footsteps are heard because, of course, there are no cars, the need to shop every day for fresh foods – there are no supermarkets, and again no cars to transport huge loads of groceries, and little storage in the residents’ small flats. But I especially enjoy Brunetti, who is both wonderfully human and essentially Venetian. He loves food and wine, so his meals, and even aperitifs, are described in glorious detail; he loves Paola and has great conversations with her; he worries about his children as they grow up. He is (thank goodness) not perfect, but he is a very good man and one you'd like to share a few proseccos with.

Kate Shugak – Dana Stabenow’s A Cold Day for Murder, A Fatal Thaw, and many more

Kate Shugak is a native Aleut private investigator. She lives in a cabin in the Alaskan National Park with Mutt, her half wolf, half Husky dog. She’s tough, smart and determined, and again I very much enjoy finding out about a very different way of life – both Shugak’s day to day existence in modern Alaska, and the stories of her forebears. Stabenow writes in concise, spare prose – there are no long wordy descriptions, we need to concentrate to understand what is going on, and I like that. Characters are brought in without explanation – gradually we work out who they are and why they’re here, and this to me if far more satisfying than having everything set out on the page. And despite the author’s economy of words, we really do feel the deep cold and storms of the Alaskan winter, the remoteness of the locations, and the warmth and comfort inside the community’s homes.

Sheila Malory – Hazel Holt’s A Time to Die, Superfluous Death, No Cure for Death, and many more

Sheila lives in a small West Country town. She’s a semi-retired widow with a Siamese cat, a dog, and an active social life in her local community – where, of course, unexplained deaths just keep on happening. Sheila and her similarly placed friend Rosemary investigate, but only in the mildest of ways, often solving the crimes more by thought than action. So far, so Miss Marple, you may be thinking, but Sheila is nothing like Miss M.  For a start, she is the narrator of each book, so we are able to enjoy her sensible ideas and, in particular, her dry wit. I love reading about her life, her son, her opinionated granddaughter Alice, and her numerous friends – all of whom are very recognisable, from Anthea, the bossy organiser of the local community centre to Mrs Dudley, Rosemary’s imperious mother, ‘now in full Lady Bracknell mode.’ Sheila is kind and helpful, but she’s nobody’s fool, and when she gets fed up her little moans and groans are very human, as is her recourse to ‘a quiet glass of sherry.’ Hazel Holt only started writing these novels in her own retirement, so that gives hope to us all.

Charles Ashworth – Susan Howatch’s Starbridge series.

I didn’t read these books in order, so I first encountered Ashworth when he had already become Bishop of Starbridge. He is pompous, over-confident, hugely opinionated, and critical of anyone who disagrees with him. I think I liked him so much because at the time I was working for someone who was very similar, and in a similar setting. The Starbridge series has a large cast of clergy and hangers on, and a working knowledge of English cathedrals, with all their Vicars Choral, High Church rituals, and pivotal theological moments might be useful – but I didn’t have most of those and I still enjoyed these books very much, mainly thanks to Charles Ashworth, who is nothing if not a charismatic personality, and whose attitude to the rapid changes taking place, both in the church and in the wider world, in the 1960s, is pretty ante-deluvian. In the last book in the series, Absolute Truths, a tragedy finally shocks Ashworth into reconsidering many aspects of his life, and we find out that he is human after all, and the reasons for some of his past behaviour.