Peter Firth

[Silktie]

Peter's role is only in a handful of scenes of the book so he's definately only one of the minor characters.
But with what his character does (or not does...) he has quite some effect on some other persons appearing in the book so I think his scenes should at least be important for the whole story development.

Don't like the sound of that... Does that mean he plays another bad guy in this one?! Answers under spoilers please.

Ok, hope I can get this right and it won't be too long...

Series South Riding Spoiler

He's not really playing a bad guy but his character is manipulating someone else (Huggins, a preacher) into investing money into a house building scheme which then fails.
He lends some money to Huggins who got a girl pregnant and tells him of his plans to use some land to build houses and Huggins doesn't keep this to himself but gets some other people involved who also secretly invest money into that scheme.

At the end of the book it is clear that he only lent the money, so he could see that Huggins would do exactly what he expected him to do as some kind of experiment.

I think he's not really bad but he lacks something in social interaction. The other people respect him for his achievements (he's quite rich) and he's also clearly doing quite some things for the community but nobody can't really connect to him.

His characterization in the book is really good and I understood how he must seem to other people but I also understood his motives. There are so many good descriptions of people in this book and of human behaviour, I'm really glad I've read it...

Ah okay, thanks for that, as I'm not sure whether we'll ever see South Riding here.