Word: protagonists
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...issues into a series of dogfights among irregular bands of mercenaries. Troops move about the country without pattern, leaving one hamlet in flames as they stalk out to feed on the next. It is the captain of such a rogues' company before whom Vogel, the author's protagonist, is dragged. With nothing more at stake than a life grown intolerable, Vogel speaks glibly. Instead of looting and marching on, he suggests, why should not the soldiers quarter themselves in the isolated village for the winter? Surely there are no battles worth joining for troops whose only allegiance...
...vicious characters, jailers and jailed, are often splendid company, though the protagonist, who calls himself Count La Ruse, is bedeviled by his author's insistence that, like the Pirates of Penzance, he is an authentic and fundamentally virtuous nobleman "who has gone wrong." His vis-a-vis, the jailer's daughter, is a salty bit of mutton, a lively dollop of trollop, when she is not made to work at it too hard. Other scoundrels are beautifully done, notably an ineffable poisoner who comes at first glance amazingly close to success in his function of representing Unashamed Ultimate Evil...
...Rabb is an intelligent and imaginative director. But no matter what values he feels may have changed in Streetcar, I'm afraid the protagonist of the play has not. This is not Stanley's play nor ever will be, and to try and make it so by removing every trace of grace and nobility from Blanche, leaving her as little more than a drunken whore, is hardly fair to Mr. Williams. Once this is done, the play is no longer Blanche's tragedy, nor does it become Stanley's triumph, but rather an extended sort of fertility rite. "Procreative power...
What will most grasp the reader's attention, however, is the no-holds-barred sex which enlivens the mid-summer campaign for the governorship of Mississippi. In this connection it is useful that the protagonist, although paunchy and past his prime, is possibly the biggest man with the girls south of Memphis. Also that the two fully developed female characters are nymphomaniacs allows for frequent relaxations from the business of capturing the statehouse. The only problem with all this is that it imposes the necessity of building up to greater and greater exploits and more improbable melodrama. With the first...
...Most of the same characters are still loping through the bedrooms and back alleys of Alexandria: Pursewarden, the slightly mad novelist-diplomat; Justine, the dark-browed, amoral Jewess; Nessim, her millionaire Coptic Christian husband; Darley, the sad-sack Irish schoolteacher; Melissa, the tuberculous Greek dancer. But the protagonist of this new book is a relative newcomer, David Mountolive, who returns to Egypt as British ambassador after having lived there in his youth...