Why do we care what happens to people who don’t even exist? How can we become deeply engrossed in tales of mystery, adventure, romance, monsters and other planets when we know they are fabrications? How can people make careers out of making up these nonexistent people and events? Is everyone involved on either side of this boondoggle crazy? As an inveterate reader and a writer myself, the answers are important to me.
George RR Martin has been reviled for taking so long finishing his fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, on which HBO based its popular television series Game of Thrones. Fanatics have made many attempts on the life of Salman Rushdie, including a near-fatal stabbing in 2022, because of his novel The Satanic Verses. Horror writer Stephen King has been taken to task by readers for ruthlessly killing off the sympathetic and innocent in his bestsellers. Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, were both hounded by the public till they added to the canons of their most beloved characters.
So this stuff obviously matters a lot to some of us, but I’ve heard variations on the opening questions of this essay asked in what we’ve agreed to consider ‘real life.’ Some people do not read for pleasure, and honestly don’t grasp why anyone would. They disdain the reading of fiction as a waste of time (some while slavishly devoted to television, but that’s another subject entirely, and one beaten to death by the late Harlan Ellison in a bygone era; check out his essay “Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don’t Look So Terrific Yourself,” the introduction to his absolutely killer 1978 short-story collection Strange Wine.
The operative phrase is “willful suspension of disbelief.” To be absorbed by a story you have to be able to temporarily accept the relevance of fictional events and the actuality of fictional characters. On more than a temporary basis, of course, this could be a problem, and you might end up on the news. But this process is generally and ideally effortless, though admittedly tougher in some cases where language or style may be a hindrance, such as in the works of Shakespeare or HP Lovecraft.
Moving pictures on a screen are easier to consume (or be consumed by). They require no effort or commitment. Believe or don’t, nobody cares. Keanu will keep on leaping around and killing people for two hours, whether you’re paying attention or not.
A movie doesn’t need you; a book does. It’s a relationship, you’re involved. You give the characters life. Without you, Lawrence Block’s friendly neighborhood hit man Keller is garroting no one. Jim never meets Blind Pew or Long John Silver if you don’t read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Spider Robinson’s patrons at Callahan’s can’t get drunk and save the world if you don’t give them your time and attention.
Books are filled with, and rely on, characters. The best plot in the history of literature means little if filled with two-dimensional characters that no one cares about. Not all these make-believe people are likeable, but a well realized character will make you feel something. You may love them, sneer at them, hate them — and you will, if they’re done right. The writer gives his creations rich lives and qualities calculated to evoke your response, from JRR Tolkien’s brave hobbit Frodo Baggins to HG Wells’ irresponsibly overweight Pyecraft to Ken Kesey’s coldly authoritarian Nurse Ratched. But unless you read about them, they’re trapped forever between those immovable pages.
It’s the involvement of the reader that makes a book more than words in a row, peppered with punctuation marks. It’s the reader’s appreciation that renders the character laudable or despicable. It’s the reader that gives the writer’s work meaning.
I sincerely pity the non-reader, confined forever to one world, one era and one reality. I’ve crossed galaxies with Robert Heinlein and Joe Haldeman. I’ve been transported through time by Dumas and Jack London. I’ve seen reality twisted by Ellison and Christopher Moore. If I go blind, I’ll learn Braille. If I lose my fingers, I’ll resort to audio books and the hundreds of books I’ve already read and remember fondly.
