Books with unlikeable characters

[Booklover23]

Ok so not very Christmassy but I am a fan of an unlikeable protagonist.

Any recommendations for my last book of the year?

The main character in "Slammerkin" by Emma Donoghue is very hard to like. I liked the story but not her!

Line of beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. Everyone is an 80s Tory arsehole. Everyone.

Great book though.

Definitely We Need to Talk About Kevin. I couldn't finish A Prayer for Owen Meany as I found him so annoying! I also found it difficult to like anyone in Never Met Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

The Poppy War.

It's fantasy based on the Japaense invasion of China in WW2. Pretty dark toward the end.

I was going to add this! A great book, especially if you like an unreliable narrator, but a hard read due to actions of said narrator…

Anything by Lionel Shriver

Lots of Ian McEwan

Anything by Maupassant but especially Boule de Suif

Lots of wartime novels have many unlikeable characters, for obvious reasons although the main protagonist is usually likeable enough. Not sure if it needs to be the main character who is unlikeable?

Perfume - Patrick Suskind

Mansfield Park is another one - Fanny is difficult to warm to with modern sensibilities, and Edmund is pretty insufferable- you get a ‘happy’ ending, but no one really comes out of it well. The supposedly charming Crawfords don’t have many redeeming features either. It’s an interesting book though, makes you wonder what else Austen would have written if she had lived longer…

Oh I really admire Fanny! I suppose her virtues are as you say not for ‘modern sensibilities’ ( I won’t say what that implies).

David Copperfield gets on my nerves, he is so obviously the author in light disguise , and can do no wrong , which makes for a rather uninvolving tale. Actually quite a few of Dickens’ male leads are rather annoying, thé minor characters have more varied traits and are so much more interesting.

Cathy in East of Eden is one of the most evil characters you'll ever come across, she's great in an terrible way

I just couldn’t warm to HC. Found him so relentlessly negative and just unpleasant. I know he’s suffered trauma, he’s depressed and he’s a teenager. Still unlikeable to me. Just my personal feelings on it.

Great to meet another S and R fan! I actually adore Charlotte, despite her awfulness — her consciousness of her own squat plainness and unfeminine cleverness and her desperate grá for dire Roddy, and that brilliantly chilling moment where she thinks about pretending to fall and let the spooked horses trample Francie in the lane…

Never Greener by Ruth Jones.

SlightDrip it’s so sad that Ross died young as I think the books after her death are less good, though I very much enjoyed The Big House at Inver.
Yes, I sometimes wonder about Charlotte’s dash to shut the gate but if IIRC she wasn’t aware then of Roddy’s feelings for Francie.
The scene at the station when Francie sees Hawkins getting into the train with the Dysarts is so good that I’m sure one or both of the authors must have experiences something similar.
At the end, I wish there had been an epilogue of what happened next!
There was a tv series made but Charlotte was shown as a slim, quite attractive woman which completely missed the point.

Most of Martin Amis's books are filled to the brim with horrible people. London Fields is a particularly good example of this.

Good call!

Time Travellers Wife - both protagonists

Yes, Jeananne Crowley! I wish someone would make another adaptation. Who would be good as Charlotte? Would Siobhán McSweeney be good? I saw her onstage not long ago and thought she would have the necessary intelligence

Has anyone mentioned A Confederacy of Dunces - sorry, I haven't RTFT but I absolutely HATED the protagonist (and most of the book to be honest). I don't understand why it is often on 'top 100 book lists'.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. We had very mixed views on the main characters. One in particular was hard to like; some of us disliked all 3 of them.

Oh yes! That was excellent.

She is only one character among many, but Northey in Don’t Tell Alfred was maddening - a goody-goody and a sneak.
Did Nancy Mitford realise how annoying she was or did she intend her to be a sympathetic character. Same re Marianne in Sense & Sensibility

Oh God yes, @Andante57 Northey is insufferable. I also hate nearly everyone in The Blessing. I think Nancy Mitford intended Northey to be charming but Don’t Tell Alfred is one of those books where the author is trying to write about a time or vibe they just don’t understand. Agatha Christie suffered from this late in her career but having said that, I still like a lot of her later books, especially The Pale Horse.

I think Nancy Mitford intended Northey to be charming but Don’t Tell Alfred is one of those books where the author is trying to write about a time or vibe they just don’t understand.

@Sussurations you have hit the nail on the head. The zeitgeist had moved on and - not surprisingly as she was the older generation - she hadn’t moved with it.
This is a very interesting aspect of writing - as you say, the same happened with Agatha Christie.
Elizabeth Bowen? She was such a formidably intelligent woman that she sort of got away with it.
Ivy Compton Burnett just continued writing as if it was 1912.
Anthony Powell? I can’t get on with Dance to the Music of Time so I can’t comment on that.

Becky, her mum and Suze in shopaholics plus Luke

All really annoying