Friday, January 30, 2015

From Gatsby to Darcy: the top 10 liars in fiction


Nick Lake, author of There Will be Lies, selects his favourite fictional tricksters and tellers of untruths in books




Leonardo DiCaprio in The Great Gatsby
Gatsby, the greatest liar in literature? Photograph: Warner Br/Everett /Rex



Fiction is full of lies. Fiction is lies, in some sense anyway. Of course it’s not as simple as that, but the lines are blurred: authors of fiction are, fundamentally, making stuff up. Fiction is full of liars too. There are the unreliable narrators, and the lies as engines of plot – dissembling is a useful device for propelling a story, creating layers of awareness that rub against each other like tectonic plates. The reader knowing things that the characters don’t know. Characters knowing things other characters don’t know. Characters knowing things the reader doesn’t know. You could write a PhD thesis on it, but that sounds like a lot of work!
Here, instead, and with the proviso that you could pretty much pick one from every book, are my top 10 liars in fiction. More

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