Books have long lives, but if it’s possible to be late to the party celebrating an amazing book, we’re definitely late to this one. Ian Colford’s 2023 Guernica Prize-winning novel, The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard, is a mesmerizing read that runs a dazzling gamut of human emotion: love, greed, grief, jealousy, rage. You name it: the characters in this novel—particularly our protagonist, Joseph—sing with range that would make Mariah Carey weak with envy.
In Joseph—a man who falls in love with his 19-year-old cousin—we find a person to rally against and even (surprisingly and often against our better judgment) a person to rally for, despite his slippery moral footing. We are delighted to welcome Ian to our series today to ask him about creating the complex, haunting, and fascinating character of Joseph.
The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard by Ian Colford (Guernica Editions, 2023)
Q: One of the great feats of your book, to our mind, was the character of Joseph: a man who is repugnant in many ways but who we also couldn't help feel compassion toward—a surprising and disturbing realization. What is your advice to writers who want to create morally murky characters?
A: As I noted in a recent blog post about writing The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard, the character of Joseph came to me more or less fully formed. At the time I was writing the book, I wasn’t giving much thought to his status in the reader’s eyes, as someone they would like or dislike. My aim on days when I sat down to write was simply to keep the story moving forward. But as I got deeper into the story and saw what Joseph was doing, I grew more aware of the notion of sympathy. And after I finished it and started letting people read it, I had to wonder what they’d think of him.
Writing the book was a learning process and a lot of the time I was writing on instinct. But one thing I was sure of was that I didn’t want Joseph to be a nefarious schemer. I knew that if his intention from the get-go was to cause harm, the story would be boring, for me and for the reader. Instinct told me to dig deep into his history and find ways to give his character complexity and nuance. I wanted Joseph to be a puzzle for the reader to unravel. Because people behave in puzzling ways. They behave badly. Sometimes they even act against their own best interests. For the novel to work, the reader had to see Joseph as flawed and vulnerable. What makes our response to him so complicated is that we’re witnessing a fundamentally decent man struggling against base impulses. He knows he’s behaving badly. It eats at him, and yet he comes up with justifications that make it possible for him to carry on with behaviour that the reader will regard as unforgivable.
My advice for writers who want to create a morally murky character is to get to the root of why the character acts the way he does. If the reasons are simplistic (he’s doing it for revenge, or for kicks), then—probably but admittedly not always—the character you create will be one dimensional. If your character isn’t engaged in a struggle, not only will the reader quickly lose interest, but you, the writer, will tire of him. As a writer of fiction, your first responsibility is to write something the reader will find interesting, and a dependable compass to help you navigate your way through a novel manuscript is your own sense of what’s interesting. If you find your character boring, it’s likely the reader will too. But if you’ve endowed your character with the kind of depth that brings them convincingly to life and fires up your imagination every time you sit down to write, then there’s a reasonable chance your reader will be transfixed by what you’ve written.
More about The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard:
The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard is a contemporary tale of obsessive love, sexual transgression, and tragic loss. Bachelor and professional accountant Joseph Blanchard has led a socially active but emotionally cautious life until his late thirties. When he discovers that his beautiful cousin Sophie, a talented concert pianist, is in love with him, he finds he is powerless to resist her youthful charms, and against his better judgment embarks on a passionate affair. To avoid causing pain to her parents, the two lovers conspire to keep their relationship a secret. For a time, they are happy. But Sophie's career forces her to spend time in the company of other musicians, many of them young men. Consumed by jealousy, Joseph allows rage to take control, with tragic results. Grieving, he prepares to destroy all evidence of the affair. But when a family secret is exposed, it reveals the past in a new light. Eventually, his health in decline and with nothing but memories, he reveals his secret to a confidant.
Author Ian Colford.
More about Ian Colford:
Ian Colford was born, raised and educated in Halifax. His reviews and stories have appeared in many print and online publications. He is the author of two collections of short fiction and two novels and is the recipient of the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award for Evidence.