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Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
The Costs of Complicity
For much of If We Were Villains, the crime that the six students commit seems to be one of lack of action, rather than an act of aggression: collectively they decide not to prevent their grievously injured classmate, Richard, from dying in the lake. In a novel organized around acting, this is an important moment of not acting and it is a decision that they undertake together. As a result, no one person is responsible for Richard’s death, although, all six of them are complicit in it. Although Oliver will accept sole responsibility for what comes to be defined as murder, taking the blame that arguably belongs to another character, much of the novel examines the nature of collective, rather than individual, guilt. None of the characters are innocent, not even Richard’s cousin Wren, but, as they believe he merely fell, none are responsible either. Collectively, they create a story or script for what has occurred and, as good actors, they stick to it.
Yet what the students have done, or not done, causes them to unravel, both individually and as a group. James becomes violent, Alexander overdoses, Oliver sees Richard’s ghost, Wren withdraws from the others almost entirely, and Meredith struggles to sleep. Only Filippa seems unflappable and motivated, she explains late in the novel, to protect the only family she’s ever had. In the end, Oliver saves his peers, and especially James, when he accepts full responsibility for their collective decision. In so doing, he acts, as James had thought he might, as a tragic hero. His tragic flaw is generosity, taking on himself the burden of their shared guilt. His is a surprising choice, but one that deepens the novel’s investigation of the dynamics and implications of complicity.
All the World’s a Stage: The Drama of Life
As students at Dellecher, the seven young actors are trained to use their most powerful and intimate emotions to bring Shakespeare’s characters to life on stage. The skills they learn create compelling performances but, as If We Were Villains makes clear, they also introduce confusion about where a character ends and the actor begins. According to Gwendolyn, each performance is half the actor, half the character. Richard presents the most obvious example of the problems this fusion can generate. Although he begins the year with great enthusiasm, Richard quickly becomes violent, injuring his peers on stage and treating them cruelly offstage. The group grows wary of Richard’s obnoxious behavior and wonder if this is him or his characters, who are imperious tyrants and kings. No matter which is true, Richard meets Caesar’s fate, dying a bloody death at the hands of a former friend.
At Dellecher, the fourth year is devoted to tragedy. Even before their group stages its own tragedy, they are steeped in the genre’s conventions. At the end of Act 4, for example, Oliver observes that next must come a reckoning and then a fall, both elements of the dramas they study. Throughout the novel, the students experience their lives defined by Shakespeare’s plays, using his language to communicate and share their feelings. At the end of the novel, awaiting trial for a murder he did not commit, Oliver explains his motivation to Alexander and Filippa by asking if they would ever try to change the end of one of the great tragedies. In confessing, in other words, he sees himself as rewriting and living out a Shakespearean tragedy.
Graduating into Adulthood
The main characters in If We Were Villains are in the final year of college, poised on the cusp of adulthood. As much as this is a novel about complicity, art, and responsibility, it also explores what it means to mature into adulthood beyond the protective confines of Dellecher as the students form adult relationships. For example, Filippa is in a long-term relationship with Camilo, the combat instructor, when she picks up Oliver from prison, a relationship that had been quietly initiated when she was a student. Meanwhile, Oliver enters a romantic relationship with Meredith while harboring confused feelings toward James. These affections serve to establish or destroy the basis of their future lives. Meanwhile, their professional lives hang in the balance. Talent scouts will attend their spring performance and glittering futures shimmer on the horizon. As with all college seniors, they are poised to graduate and take their places in the adult world.
Because the novel is narrated by Oliver, the changes he undergoes on the way to maturity are the most explicit, both in terms of his relationship to his family and to his own sexuality. When Oliver’s family tells him that they cannot pay for his final semester at Dellecher, Oliver is forced to find a way to pay for it himself, taking a custodial position and establishing what seems to be the basis for full independence. That he ends the semester imprisoned, rather than independent and free as he had imagined, adds a layer of irony to his development. Equally important is his realization that he has feelings for James, as well as for Meredith. The novel is explicit about sexual desire and its expression—Alexander is in a relationship with Colin, and Meredith is paired with both Richard and Oliver. This leaves open a range of possibilities for Oliver, renewed at the novel’s end as he searches for information about James from Meredith’s apartment. The situation Oliver finds himself in at the end of the novel, with many possible futures, all radically different from what Oliver once imagined, reinforces the point that maturation into adulthood is a nebulous and complex journey.
