These Violent Delights

Roma Montagov is the other protagonist of the novel and Juliette’s love interest. The son of Lord Montagov, Roma is vying for the position of heir of the White Flowers. Although he was raised in Shanghai, he is Russian. The narrator describes him as having “dark hair, dark eyes, and pale skin” (15).

Roma faces a similar upbringing to Juliette, surrounded by gang violence. The Scarlet Gang murdered his mother. However, unlike Juliette, he reacts to the gangs’ blood feud by avoiding violence. Instead of holding the Scarlet Gang responsible for his mother’s death, he views the blood feud as a toxic situation for which no one is to blame. He views violence as a last resort, and when he does have to use it, it makes him physically sick. He is haunted by his choice to betray Juliette, but he stands by it, since he believes it was necessary to save her life. Despite his distaste for violence, he still seeks his father’s approval.

When his father assigns him the task of solving the mystery of the madness, Roma jumps at the opportunity to use his intellect to attack the problem. Roma’s approach to solving the madness is empirical and scientific. He collects evidence, makes conjectures, and tries to track down the source using deduction. When he sets his mind to a task, he commits to seeing it through since “Roma did nothing half-heartedly” (301).

Furthermore, Roma is very protective of his little sister, Alisa. When she becomes ill with the madness, he grows more emotionally invested in finding a cure. Roma is also drawn to working with Juliette to track down the source of the madness because he is still in love with her. However, he is wary of the violent and merciless reputation she has cultivated since she last lived in Shanghai. Roma is compassionate but holds others to high moral standards. When Juliette kills a man sent to murder them both, he grows angry with her for causing an unnecessary death. Still, when he and Juliette make the mistake of assassinating the wrong person, he comforts Juliette and points out to her that they are both reacting to circumstances outside their control. His ability to see the bigger picture allows him to recognize the futility of the rivalry between the two gangs.

Kathleen Lang is Lord Cai’s niece and Juliette’s friend and confidante. She is a transgender woman. Her father sent her and her siblings to Paris, where she was known by the name Celia. Her father initially refused to call her by her chosen name. When her sister, the original Kathleen Lang, died of the flu at age 14, her father allowed her to assume Kathleen’s name. Her family pretends to the world that Celia died instead of the original Kathleen to hide the new Kathleen’s transgender identity. Aside from Kathleen’s father, Juliette and Kathleen’s sister Rosalind are the only ones who know her secret. Anxious about having her identity discovered, Kathleen is particularly loyal to Juliette because Juliette protected her when one of Rosalind’s friends, Amethyst, tried to bully her and almost discovered her secret.

Kathleen is a pacifist who wants the gang violence to end. She is introspective but also pragmatic: “She would never write a summary on the latest blood feud casualty and then offer a wise idiom on the cyclical nature of violence. She would lay out a step-by-step procedure on stopping further brutality so they could live in peace” (108). She also is sympathetic to the Communists because she does not want foreign powers to take over the city.

Kathleen questions Juliette’s use of force since she prefers to solve things without violence, but ultimately, she remains loyal to Juliette and trusts her to do the right thing. She is Juliette’s assistant, following up on leads and spying for her. Although she abhors violence, she helps Juliette when she needs backup, like when Juliette assassinates Zhang Gutai. Kathleen acts as Juliette’s conscience, reminding her to be careful of her actions. At the same time, Kathleen assures Juliette that she will never judge her, telling Juliette that she will “always be on [her] side, no matter what” (326).

Benedikt Montagov is Roma’s cousin and close friend. He is thoughtful, sensitive, and eccentric. He struggles with expressing his emotions and can become very focused on minute details and routines. For example, when Benedikt was a boy, “he convinced himself that he needed to run from his bedroom to the front door every morning within ten seconds, or else the day would be a bad one” (150). He also exhibits extremely specific interests and desires such as wanting to “paint the perfect sphere” and “reciting the entire Bible from front to back” (149). While he outgrew some of his childhood habits, he is still passionate about painting a sphere, thereby conveying three dimensions on a two-dimensional canvas.

Benedikt is loyal to his cousin, one of only two people who have “publicly declared their allegiance to Roma” (155). He helps Roma on his quest to track down the source of the madness, working closely with his best friend and roommate, Marshall. While working alongside Marshall, he starts to develop romantic feelings for him. However, Benedikt is uncomfortable with these feelings, so he objects to Roma asking him to go with Marshall to stake out the Communist Leader’s house. When he believes Marshall is dead, he is completely distraught.

Marshall Seo is Roma’s friend and a member of the White Flower gang. His is Korean and speaks several languages, switching fluently between Russian, Korean, and Chinese. Like Mercutio, the character he is modeled after in the original play, Marshall is an energetic, mercurial jokester. He is an outsider, not tied by blood to the Montagov family, which makes him less invested in the blood feud. He is more loyal to Roma than he is to the gang.

Every in the novel, the narrator hints that Marshall is gay, stating that he was “embroiled in a scandal involving another boy and a dark storage closet” (42), but that he responds to the gossip about this incident “with a Cheshire-cat grin on his face” (42). The novel also hints that Marshall has romantic feelings for Benedikt, but he never states his feelings aloud.

Marshall makes light of the violence in the city, but like Mercutio, he plays the role of the fool: He uses wit and humor to share his brilliant insights with other characters. When Marshall discovers that the insects are burrowing into people’s brains, he likens them to fleas on a dog. His comments on the violent nature of people in the city are also significant. However, Marshall gets into trouble when he takes his jokes too far, such as when he jokingly tries to fight Juliette in Lourens’s lab or when he pretends to have contracted the madness to scare Benedikt. Marshall also takes dangerous risks. For example, he wrests a weapon from one of the Scarlet Gang in the scene in the hospital, leading to Tyler shooting him.

Paul Dexter, also known as the Larkspur, is the antagonist of the novel. He is a good-looking British man around the same age as Juliette. He schemes to infect the city with madness to keep the Communists from interfering with his capitalist interests and to enrich himself by selling a vaccine that prevents the contagion. He conceals his identity, using the alias of the Larkspur and pretending to be Larkspur’s agent.

Paul represents the corrupt foreign interests trying to dominate Shanghai. His plot to infect the city with a disease and then sell its cure exemplifies the European powers’ capitalist exploitation of the city. He stands to benefit financially from the madness and takes sadistic pleasure in seeing it kill people. Although Paul is not the monster, the narrator depicts him as monstrous, describing his smile as “the city’s damnation, planting rancor into its layers” (404). He exults in the violence and chaos he causes.

Paul is romantically interested in Juliette, pursuing her despite her rejection of his advances. He tries to lure her in by giving her clues about the Larkspur. This allows him opportunities to flirt with her while also giving her misinformation. Paul is cunning, manipulating Roma and Juliette into assassinating one of his enemies, Zhang Gutai, the Secretary General of the Communist Party. Paul claims to be in love with Juliette, but he shows no respect for her autonomy, vaccinating her without her consent. When she refuses his proposition to sell the vaccine to the Scarlet Gang and clearly rejects him, he tries to drown her. Paul is also vengeful, ordering the madness to be released again in the case of his death.