Cain and Abel. It’s the Biblical rivalry between brothers that ends in a brutal murder and gives birth to every crime story in western literature. For three thousand years we’ve been gripped by the tale because we’re fascinated by two people bound together in love and hate.
And if you’re going to write a story – a novel, a play, an epic poem – you need a conflict at the heart of it. Without conflict nothing happens. Oh yes, the conflict can be between a man and his fate to remain a second-rate football player, or a scientist and an alien, but it’s a damn sight more interesting if the alien is sentient and makes it personal, fighting back. We identify with the emotions they feel, and that’s where the thrill brims up.
What’s great about rivalry, is that it is endlessly adaptable. When I wrote Holmes and Moriarty, I took what’s probably the most famous rivalry in literature and tried turning it on its head. What if they have to work together? What if, just for a short while, they have no choice but to be bound to someone with the means and motive to kill them? And isn’t it more fun if they have a sneaking regard for each other and enjoy time in each other’s company – though the knife might plunge in at any second? It’s the tension that kills you.
Yes, literary rivalries are at their best when there’s a mutual regard. Blofeld enjoys telling Bond his plans because he wants to impress him. It’s a bit touching, in its way. And he always, sportingly, leaves the room/launchpad/volcano at just the right moment to give Bond a chance of escape, so they can fight another day.
The thinking man’s Bond/Blofeld rivalry – Smiley and Karla in John Le Carre’s series – is also based on mutual respect. The two men use the same, personal, methods against each other so much that we forget we’re reading stories about two empires in conflict, with the fate of tens of millions of people perhaps turning on whether Smiley really can find the KGB officer’s daughter. They are both friendless men fighting loneliness, their professional relationship is the closest they have to friendship. So when we see through their rivalry, we feel sorry for them too.
In fact, sometimes two opponents can barely do without each other. Javert pursues Jean Valjean for decades in Les Miserables and falls apart when he finally tracks down his former prisoner. His life has little meaning from then on; the only thing he can do is end it. It was the slow-motion fight that literally kept him alive.
The opposite, however, is the basis of the sub-genre where two personae inhabit the same body and struggle over it. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the father of this family, but we see his progeny in Fight Club and American Psycho. It’s the Cain and Abel story in concentrated form, because once they become aware of each other, only one can possibly survive.
This, too, can be turned inside out when one character feels so slighted by his opponent’s successful life that the only thing left to do is assume it. Second-rate fraudster Tom Ripley bumps off handsome, wealthy Dickie Greenleaf and lives his life for him in The Talented Mr Ripley, which kicks of Patricia Highsmith’s series. Ripley is unpleasant and not even charismatic with it – and that’s probably why we identify with him. Because we have all, at some point felt stupid next to someone brilliant. So take the lesson: next time, don’t try to best them at dinner table wit, simply crack them over the head with an oar in a small boat off the coast of Liguria and dump them over the side. You’ll feel all the better for it.
