Good Intentions and the Difficulty of Naming Evil

As a civil-rights lawyer before I became a novelist, I learned how often injustice depends on decisions that look defensible in isolation. A hiring practice, a police response, a strained interpretation of the law or a family custom may preserve an imbalance without requiring anyone to announce a wicked purpose. The people involved can explain themselves, compete for advantage or claim that circumstance left them no choice, yet their combined actions can wound a person or a community.

The question behind Why My Novel Features No Obvious Villain is not whether cruelty exists. It does. The harder question is why responsibility rarely arrives wearing a villain’s face. Gideon’s Children places its characters inside that uncomfortable terrain, where professional duty, racial prejudice, family loyalty and self-interest pull in different directions. I wanted the reader to experience moral uncertainty as a pressure against the skin, not as a tidy puzzle with one solution.

Conflict without a convenient enemy

A conventional antagonist offers the reader a clear map. Once that figure appears, suspicion has an obvious destination, and sympathy can be distributed with relative confidence. Such characters can be frightening or compelling, but they spare us the sustained work of examining choices whose motives are mixed and whose consequences are uneven.

I wanted the opposite in Gideon’s Children. Conflict comes from people trying to protect something—a reputation, a client, a relative, an institution or their own understanding of justice—while the cost falls on someone else. Their motives are often sincere enough to make the outcome more disturbing. Good intentions do not erase harm, but neither does bad behaviour automatically make a person irredeemably evil.

This does not mean every character deserves equal sympathy or that every wrong is excused. It means moral ambiguity is not moral equivalence. A person can act unjustly while remaining frightened, loving or capable of change. Another may behave courteously while participating in a gravely inequitable arrangement. The novel asks readers to separate intention from effect, recognise self-deception when it appears and resist the comfort of assigning all darkness to a single enemy.

Institutions carry more than individuals

The law occupies an important place in the novel, but the law never appears by itself. Behind every rule stands a history of custom, uneven access and assumptions about who may be trusted. Characters invoke procedure because procedure offers authority, yet procedure can conceal the very prejudice it claims to contain. A neutral-seeming process may reproduce the inequality it was designed to prevent.

That lesson came from my own legal experience and from the history of civil-rights work in the United States. Progress frequently arrives through people arguing that a neutral rule has not been applied neutrally. The related biographical and literary background is available through Caryn M Sullivan’s site, where readers can continue exploring the context surrounding the author’s work.

Australian readers will recognise the tension between inherited systems and individual responsibility in public life. Canberra’s parliamentary precinct may look like a collection of formal procedures, yet the values carried into those chambers are shaped by the country’s history and by people who entered the institutions with different degrees of power. Many Australian gatherings now open with an Acknowledgement of Country, a custom that names the continuing presence and sovereignty of Traditional Custodians. Such acknowledgements do not settle questions of justice, but they reveal how difficult it is to enter a public space as though history had left no trace.

People are not single moral labels

Characterisation becomes more persuasive when a person can contradict the impression they have made. In Gideon’s Children, the reader is given evidence, context and partial knowledge, but never a complete explanation that closes down interpretation. Each figure displays tendencies that can support more than one reading.

These qualities shape how the characters behave:

• Self-protection can become self-deception. A character may describe an unkind decision as the only practical choice while quietly resisting the truth of its consequences.
• Professional confidence can conceal fear. Competence gives people authority, yet it may also become a shelter from uncertainty or a reason to dismiss advice from those with less power.
• Family loyalty can compete with fairness. Love for a relative may prompt honesty in one direction and silence in another.
• Reform can carry old habits. A person committed to a better future may still use familiar assumptions to decide who deserves trust.

The same behaviour may therefore look different when seen from opposite positions. The person benefiting from a biased system may sincerely regard that system as ordinary, while the person harmed by it experiences every application of the rule as personal and relentless.

The characters’ motives are bound up with the systems surrounding them:

• Complicity need not take a spectacular form. It may appear in an omitted fact, a convenient delay or an assumption that somebody else will deal with the problem.
• Resistance can begin in compromised circumstances. Someone may challenge an injustice while still holding views or habits that injure others.
• Institutional pressure rewards particular performances. People learn which words invite approval and which truths threaten their standing.
• Compromise may ease immediate suffering while preserving injustice. A humane result in one case can leave the underlying practice untouched.

None of these contradictions is intended as a shield. The characters still make choices, and those choices still produce suffering. Their complexity forces the reader to ask a more demanding question than whether a person is good or bad: what pressures shaped the decision, who benefited, who paid and what might have been done differently?

Australian habits and the search for justice

Australians bring their own cultural habits to a story about prejudice and responsibility. On a Sydney ferry, commuters often share a confined public space with people whose histories and economic positions differ sharply. The morning crossing may look routine, yet it carries reminders that civic life depends upon strangers extending a fairness that families and tribes do not have to negotiate on an ordinary day.

Melbourne’s laneway culture offers another familiar contrast between surface and substance. The aroma of coffee drifts past small venues, trams sound their bells and a weekend conversation may move easily from sport to politics. Behind that ease lies the history of a city shaped by settlement, migration and the displacement of peoples who were never asked to approve its development. An ordinary custom can seem natural to those who inherit its benefits while appearing intrusive or unfair to those outside it.

Australian public life also contains strong rituals of belonging. Saturday AFL matches turn grounds into temporary neighbourhoods, where people who may disagree about almost everything share loyalty to a local side. Those communal loyalties can generate generosity, humour and accountability, though they can also harden into tribalism. The mixture echoes the novel’s central concern: affection for one’s own group may produce the strongest emotions without supplying the clearest moral judgement.

These influences meet readers in the Australian book market, where Gideon’s Children can be found through Dymocks, Angus & Robertson, Booktopia and independent booksellers. Book-club discussions, library loans and conversations in neighbourhood cafés have long given Australian readers ways to examine difficult subjects together. That setting is well suited to a novel that asks whether a harmful choice can disappear when it is divided among respectable people.

Read beyond the search for a monster

Ambiguity is harder to write than caricature. A villain can dominate a narrative through volume, menace or transparent cruelty. A morally conflicted character demands subtler control because every scene must carry several possible meanings without pretending that all meanings are equally valid. The reader must remain alert to both the character’s inner life and the social conditions surrounding that life.

The absence of an obvious antagonist also sharpens the question of agency. If responsibility cannot be assigned to one monster, it cannot simply vanish. It must be traced through choices: who spoke, who stayed silent, who benefited and who was left carrying the damage. That approach treats readers as active participants in judgement rather than consumers of a predetermined verdict.

The title Gideon’s Children carries its own suggestion of inheritance. Children receive the world their elders have made, including its achievements and its unfinished conflicts. That can be read through law, family and public life, and it connects with the personal terrain explored in An Irish Experience, where travel becomes an examination of belonging and cultural inheritance.

Read Gideon’s Children, published in 2001, through the booksellers listed on this site, then explore the excerpts, reviews, media interviews and blog reflections gathered here. Follow the story with An Irish Experience and consider how history travels through places, institutions and families. Begin with the novel, and read beyond the search for a monster.