Opinion and Analysis
14th Feb 2012
My Three Least Favourite…Fictional Couples
Hey there, fellow singletons! Fed up of being patronised by varying dating websites into thinking a) that being single is something you can ‘give up’ (what do you get? A progress chart with points for each day spent solidly in the company of someone else?) or b) that someone demanding you smile for them on a station platform isn’t actually harassment but is in fact romantic and fun? Never fear! Here are my three favourite books to throw at the wall when Valentine’s Day calls.
Meggie Clearly and Father Ralph
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
God, I hated Meggie Clearly. Heroines that we are told are amazing and brilliant without actually been shown an example of them being so (well hi there, Fanny Price, how are you today? Oh, insipid and dull, what a massive change for you…) nark me off like nothing else. And Meggie is a classic example.
Moving with her large family from their New Zealand small holding to her rich aunt’s farm in Australia as a young child, Meggie soon becomes the firm favourite of the (then) young ambitious priest, Father Ralph. He becomes obsessed with her natural qualities and innocent nature (think Shirley Temple meets young Cathy Linton).
As she grows up into the beautiful young woman the genre demands, this friendship/obsession becomes something more tangible and, worried that his growing position in the Church shall be affected if he succumbs to the charms of the woman fifteen years his junior, Ralph tells Meggie to leave him and find love elsewhere.
Meggie decides that the best plan is to completely mess up the rest of her life and marries someone who looks a bit like Ralph, who she doesn’t love. They then spend the next forty odd years hating each other, whilst also loving each other desperately.
The Thorn Birds is basically Wuthering Heights, but set in Australia, and, whilst fantastically written for the most part, made me very very very glad I’ve got the friends I do, who won’t let me ruin my own and everyone else’s lives, just to prove a point.
Alex and Sam
Lightning by Danielle Steel
Now, Danielle Steel has written some lovely couples. If you want some genuinely good, if trashy as anything, romance books you can’t go wrong with either Fine Things or Star, which I also read for my Steelathon back in 2010.
Lightning, however, was the book that I threw against the wall, entirely because of the relationship between Alex and her husband Sam. Alex is a successful lawyer living with her husband and their child in New York, when she is diagnosed with breast cancer.
Her husband Sam then proceeds to act like the biggest shit since time began. His mother died when he was young, leaving him with Massive Issues, and Alex being ill is clearly her fault, trying to make his life hell.
The worst moment for me was when Alex, having gone to chemo on her own for three months is throwing up on the bathroom floor and Sam asks her, not very nicely, if she wouldn’t mind putting her wig back on.
See, I wouldn’t mind if Alex left this sack of shit and found herself a wonderful partner who is everything that someone you love should be, which she almost does.
But no, no, even after he has treated her so appallingly, cheated on her, ruined her life even more than the disease, she takes him back. Because she loves him. Because love is ridiculous.
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
Matthew and Diana
There are many, many reasons why I hated the relationship between Matthew, King of the Manpires (like vampires, but more manly) and Diana, who starts off well but then goes rapidly downhill to end up a simpering wreck, flooded with a power she doesn’t want to understand, clutched frailly against her man’s chest. But the line that made me throw the book against the wall has to be:
” Matthew took my hands in his, ‘That’s enough bravery for one day, ma lionne’.”
Gah.
How about you? Which fictional couples do you hate? Bella and Edward? Cathy and Heathcliff? Tell us in the comments…
Jess Haigh
Bella and Edward. I used to love the Twilight books and then one day my mum read them and her summary of their relationship made me see the light.
‘They never go out anywhere. If she was my daughter I’d be saying that they needed to get off their arses and do something’. So true mother, so true.
Sam & Clara from India Knight’s ‘My Life on a Plate’ & ‘Comfort & Joy’. She makes such a bad impression in the first book I literally can’t understand why he’s interested in her, & how they inexplicably end up married in the time that passes before the sequel. Then, in the second book she basically cheats on him anyway.
Liv Tyler and Viggo Mortensen.
Harry and Ginny – though I love Ginny
Bond and Moneypenny
Harry and Ginny would be one of mine too, but for the opposite reason! Ginny does my head in, though she’s better in the books than the films…
Chick lit couples I hate include, controvertially, Ralph and Jem from Ralph’s Party. Because I am in love with Ralph and Jem is not me. Because I really am that pathetic.
Haven’t read anything by India Knight, even though I love her twitter feed. Are they worth reading even though you hate the characters?
Well I’ve only read those 2 but they are (in my opinion) shockingly bad considering she seems a perfectly intelligent woman. I gave Comfort & Joy a pretty harsh review and she wasn’t that happy about it. I wouldn’t recommend them, they’re pretty standard chick lit really.
Marianne and Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility – him for being a total cad and her for being pathetic about it.
ALL the couples in Sense and Sensibility drive me up the wall! JUST TALK TO EACH OTHER!!!! IT’S NOT HARD!!!!
Ugh, the worst are Fanny and Edmund from Mansfield Park. A pair of sanctimonious dullards about whom the best one can say is that they’re well suited to each other. It’s like she decided to rewrite Pride and Prejudice with Mr Collins as the hero.
If I could ‘like’ this comment I would xxx
I’d basically have to go for
David Copperfield and his simpering child wife Dora (she dies, and not before time: a less soullessly “perfect” hero would have strangled her before the wedding).
Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy – its like Pride and Prejudice with a lobotomy, let alone Daniel the Cardboard Cad.
Romeo and Juliet, who should get over themselves and grow up, and stop and think about the stupid “pretend to be dead” plan.
I second Bella and Edward, and also vote for Marianne and Colonel Brandon in ‘Sense and Sensibility’. For a start, Edward is hundreds of years old and hanging out in school classrooms making eyes at a teenager. Colonel Brandon fancies Marianne because she looks like someone else he once loved (Paul McCartney, anyone?!). Ooh, and I always wanted Jo from ‘Little Women’ to get together with Laurie – her being with the Professor was bad enough, but Laurie marrying Amy, the spoilt, script-burning brat, tainted the whole tale for me!
Just for balance, can we nominate good couples too? I like several from ‘His Dark Materials’ – Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter/Lyra and Will – for different reasons, but essentially because Pullman makes them all complex characters and doesn’t sentimentalise. Ruth and Harry in John Irving’s ‘A Widow for One Year’ are great, and so are Nan and Florence in ‘Tipping the Velvet’.
Bit controversial perhaps but Peeta and Katniss, if it starts fake it can’t just become a real relationship.