[REVIEW] End of Month Reviews #29 - May 2006 [spoilers]

[martinphipps2 at yahoo.com]

Tom Russell wrote:

> As in SPEAK!, I'd like the reader to consider personal morality, and I
> hope to explore certain issues of right, wrong, and why basically good
> people do the wrong things and, hey, if they're doing the wrong things,
> do they cease to be good people?  I personally feel that people are
> defined by their actions and not their intentions, but by that
> definition not only is Gregory Dingham a villain, but I'm something of
> a bastard myself.  Which is not a notion I'm comfortable with.
>
> The thing about Gregory is, here was a character and a story that dealt
> with trangressing against one's self (as Saxon pointed out), and,
> because I wanted to reduce the moral conflict and focus it to an
> interior one, I removed all the external motivations I could think of:
> Gregory doesn't steal because he's poor (because he's not poor), he
> doesn't attack superheroes because he's insane or
> politically-motivated, he's doesn't fall in with Harry Cash because of
> some uber-hot supervillainess he wants to bed.  Some could argue, and
> some have, that this is really the wrong way to go: that without some
> identifiable and sympathetic motivation, that the character is evil and
> that's all there is to it.  I hope that my portrait of Gregory is more
> complex than that, and that, beyond the pleasures of story and
> character, SPEAK! can be of utility to people examining the nature of
> their own inner evil or base desires on a somewhat didactic level: that
> is, the question is not why he does things, but why he does things
> without a "why" behind them.

Don't forget that the narration came across as accusatory and sometimes
even heavy-handedly so, going so far as accusing Greggory of hating
women.  So this actually helped make Greggory sympathetic because the
narration seemed to be accusing him of things he hadn't done (or at
least not yet).

Martin

PS: My cat loves me