The point of really annoying characters - is there one?

I recently finished the novel "The Confessions of Edward Day" by Valerie Martin and was relieved. This might seem strange as the book has a lot to recommend it. It's well-written and draws you in from the start: the first sentence is: "My mother liked to say Freud should have been strangled in his crib". Its main characters are actors, and I've been stage-struck since I was a girl. What's more, the setting is New York in the Seventies. It could easily have been a pleasant read roughly in the same genre as Helen Dore Boylston's "Carol" books - though with higher pretensions and less compulsive readability - if it had not been for the hero Edward Day's loathsome nemesis Guy Margate.

And when I say loathsome I really mean it. This is a man who, whenever he enters the scene, makes your heart sink a bit. Edward can't easily get rid of him as he owes him his life, but even the life-saving is done in the most ungracious way possible. Afterwards, Guy demands money of Edward when he can ill afford it; belittles him in front of his friends (who mercifully don't pay that much attention); makes a play for his girl and, the worst part in my opinion, claims he's a bad actor. It's true that Edward is not someone you feel a great deal of sympathy for: at one time when he's working at a summer theatre in the country he falls in love with the primadonna, sleeps with the ingénue, reacts to the news that his girlfriend Madeleine is pregnant by sending her money for an abortion, and still expects her to be waiting for him when he comes back to New York, minus the kid of course. And yet, I wholeheartedly shared Edward's distaste for Guy: I gritted my teeth when the bastard was doing well and felt profound satisfaction when he was doing badly. This is quite an achievement on the author's part. But there's no denying that Margate mars the pleasure of one's reading experience more than a little bit.

What is the function of characters like this, the kind I call "please-go-away-characters"? What can they do that a charismatic villain can't? What's the point of tormenting the reader as well as the hero/heroine/other luckless person the p.g.a.-character chooses to pick on? Well, there is the achievement bit. My theory is that a lot of juicy villains started out as potential annoying characters, and then the author inadvertently made them more and more fun until they became the person we root for when we're tired of a priggish hero or virtuous heroine (which in my case would be pretty much all the time). It's hard not giving into the temptation of making the hero's arch-enemy someone it's a guilty pleasure to read or for that matter write about. So if you pull off creating a real pain in the neck, then yes, it's impressive. But then what?

There aren't that many p.g.a.-characters around, it's true. There's Raffles in "Middlemarch", and Rigaud becomes one at the end of "Little Dorrit"; up until then, he has only been one of Dickens's tamer villains, albeit one with a funny Frenchified speech-pattern. He is truly repulsive in blackmailer-mode, though. Maybe one thing these characters can do that colourful villains can't is to make us understand what a strong temptation it can be to kill someone, or at least what it feels like to want someone dead. If you put the question "Would Lady Deadlock be justified to kill Mr Tulkinghorn?" (and he is just as much a menace to her as Raffles is to Bulstrode) the answer, at least from a villain-lover like me, would be "NO, are you kidding?" If, on the other hand, the question is "Would Bulstrode be justified to kill Raffles?" the answer, in my book, is "Probably not, but do it anyway. Please, just do it. Or Will can do it. Or Casaubon. What do you mean he's dead and doesn't have a motive?"

In the case of Guy Margate, his ghastliness is probably unavoidable given the theme of the novel. But what is the theme exactly? That it's not that great being saved? In that case, isn't it cheating making the saviour a d---head? Or is the theme guilt, something poor Edward is saddled with anyway as he feels responsible for his mother's suicide? Guy makes things worse: Edward wishes him gone, although he saved his life, which can't be good for that guilt complex. Yes, all right, that kind of works. But am I glad to be reading Jude Morgan's latest and not having to spend any more time in Guy Margate's company.