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The title of M. L. Rio’s debut novel, If We Were Villains (2017), is borrowed from William Shakespeare’s King Lear, the final play the fourth-year acting students perform before Oliver Marks confesses to a crime he did not commit. In King Lear, the full line suggests that excess (“surfeits of our own behavior”) leads to disasters that people will try to blame on others. In Shakespeare, the Sun, Moon, and stars are “made guilty” as a result. The novel approaches the problem of excess and potential (‘if’) villainy differently, denying even the possibility of guilt. When the group agrees to not save their grievously injured classmate, they never ask whether this decision will make them guilty of murder, focusing instead on how it would benefit them if this abusive bully were not to be alive, and in the novel the attempt to escape responsibility wreaks havoc. Over the course of the novel’s five “acts,” the group will grapple with this conditional phrase, wondering what it means to understand themselves as villains in the drama they together enact.
At the same time, the seven main characters, including the one who dies, are joined together in complex relationships of friendship and love and part of the work of the novel is to explore the differences between these forms of affective connections. More important than fixed sexual preferences—at least one of the characters represents himself as being fluid in his desires—is the examination of how other feelings, including envy or hatred, might contribute to desire and its expression. Because many of the characters are alienated from their families, the bonds they have created during their time at Dellecher Classical Conservatory are a source of emotional comfort and strength. Yet, in trying to protect the sustaining connections they created, the group tragically embarks on a course that guarantees their collapse. At the end of the novel, Filippa tells Oliver they are no longer in touch. That he still sees the shade of Richard suggests this is not entirely true.
Although there are seven main characters, they share their lives with an eighth person, William Shakespeare. As Oliver notes in Act 2, Scene 8, Shakespeare felt like their older and wiser friend, one they could not see but whose ideas were always in their heads. He cites a line from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, “Much is the force of heaven-bred poesy” (3.2), to punctuate the thought. They speak and think in the language of Shakespeare on stage, in their classes, and in their personal lives. It is not too much to say that they cede parts of their identities to the Bard, assuming that this is a fair and reasonable bargain to make with genius. Yet, as undeniably powerful as Shakespeare’s works are, the worlds he depicts are full of dark passions. To immerse oneself in his tragedies, as the group does for their final year, is to constantly confront the worst elements of the human psyche. As the novel makes clear, this can be dangerous, perhaps especially for people who have yet to reach full maturity. When Oliver sacrifices his future to rewrite the ending of a personal tragedy which he understands as Shakespearean, he exemplifies the ease with which a young and good person can be swayed to make questionable choices by imagined intimacy with genius.
Consistent with its investment in the works of Shakespeare, the novel also poses searching questions about guilt and responsibility, about crime and punishment. The victim, Richard, is also the novel’s antagonist, a cruel bully whose rage grows whenever he is thwarted. He seemingly delights in hurting his classmates, including his own cousin. It is not hard to believe that he deserves to be punished. At the same time, however, his actions do not seem to warrant death, and it is somewhat shocking when his classmates are willing to allow him to die so easily. That they do so in the belief that they are not guilty is quickly shown to be an illusion as their complicity in his death tears them apart, individually and as a group. Nor is it easy to understand the position that James, the person most directly responsible for Richard’s death, takes. He accedes to someone else taking his place in prison, and the book’s ambiguous conclusion suggests he may enact a similar dynamic by pretending to commit suicide. Just as Richard may not be enough of a villain to warrant death, James might not be a hero who deserves a sidekick’s sacrifice. As the novel makes abundantly clear, it is often difficult to determine what should count as a crime. Is Richard’s death a murder or did James act in self-defense? What does it mean to be responsible for an action (or the failure to act)? In her investigation of these subjects, M. L. Rio demonstrates how carefully she has learned from the prior example of William Shakespeare.
