Time to exercise your noggin

He's so real he merits a plaque

It’s Use Your Imagination Week.

The exercise: What fictional character(s) would you most like to meet?

I start with a huge advantage. I spent at least a year each with Clare (Gorgon Times) and Jana (Out of Arizona), Creating them, manipulating them and falling in love with them. How are they finding middle age? OK, scrub these two wonderful women. I’ll start from scratch like the rest of you.

● First off it’s got to be Leopold Bloom, the co-lead in James Joyce’s Ulysses.  He is the most rounded, human yet humane character in all the novels I’ve read. A 1904 Jew too, so he understands life’s disadvantages. Witty. We’d pub-crawl through Dublin, me paying. Then I’d write Ulysses – The Sequel.

● Dorothea in George Eliot’s Middlemarch is a less obvious choice. Stiff-necked, a bit of a prig, she marries the aesthete, Casaubon, because “it seems the right thing to do”. And lives to regret it. But her character evolves throughout; I’d like her to discuss this evolution.

● The Countess in Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro. She’s getting older; believes the Count no longer loves her. Reflects on life in the heart-rending aria, Dove Sono. I’m not into forgiveness, she’s its epitome. I would take instruction.

● Harriet Pringle in Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy. Married to an insufferable cleverclogs whom she out-distances. We’d just chat; I’d merely give her her head.

● Almost any of the cluster of central characters in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means. For the fun of it.

● Learn how to cultivate a moral backbone from Phillip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s private eye (several novels) . Also, how to deliver great one-liners.

● Zacchaeus, the father of The Prodigal Son. Since I see the Bible as a moderately successful work of fiction.