In Honey Mountain Tansy is the strong female lead character. She’s talented, kind, clever, resourceful, brave, sympathetic, loyal……….. I could go on. In short, she is just about perfect. So, I ask myself, why has a fully paid-up sceptic like myself invented such an exemplary character? Good question. I think the answer must be “to make a sharp contrast with the not so good and make them look worse than normal description would allow” because I didn’t want to be frighteningly gruesome or over-the -top scary. I wanted the story to be light- hearted and humorous so that the reader would laugh quite a lot as well as feel sad at times and frightened at others.
I remember when Jehovah’s Witnesses used to call at the house and they would say that when the Kingdom comes everything will be perfect with no evil in the world. Sometimes I asked “How will we know that? How will we know that it’s perfect if there’s no evil to compare it with?” They didn’t seem to have a satisfactory answer so that was when I remembered that I had something burning in the oven, or a very important visit of my own to make.
If you turn the argument on its head and ask “How do we know when things are really evil if we don’t have something really good to use as a comparison?” That’s my excuse for making Tansy so perfect but you might come up with other theories.
Another thing, and this needs no excuse, it’s time that girls had a greater chance to play the hero in stories because, heaven knows, plenty of them do it in real life!
