Likable be damned: great books are rife with monstrous characters. Literature would be hard to swallow without the scummier morsels

I spent my childhood wanting the wolf to eat Little Red Riding Hood, the three little pigs to be left on the street and for Hansel and Gretel to be lost forever. In the Bible, I had a favourite character from each Testament: Cain and Judas. I learned to love reading and went back to stories again and again out of a hope that one day, if I read often enough, I would open up the New Testament to find that Judas came out the winner and the author, for once, could spring a surprise and show some mercy.

It never struck me, until recently, that readers "identify with" a character for their goodness and really do want to see the good win and the bad redeemed. This may seem a yawning hole in a life of reading, a kind of moral autism, but I am stuck with it. As a child, I thought good won because writers, like parents, had to say what they thought we ought to hear. They lied to us about life, but I could see through those lies.