The Fall of Light Book

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Two examples of unlikeableness:
• One of the protagonists who I named above goes to a whorehouse and does his business with a lass, who makes no inquiries about money up front - she must be smitten by him but still gets pissed off when he doesn't pay. But he instantly falls in love with her and gives her his boots as collateral. He comes back for her….finds her with another man (I mean she works at a whorehouse) and he gets in a fight with the man and kills him. OK……I'm supposed to give a damn about this protagonist? Sorry, a no go for me. ☹
• Another protagonist gets in a fight and ends up breaking a man's neck (kills him). Seems like the males in the family have anger management issues! ☹

Two examples of unbelievability one of which again illustrates a protagonist who I found unlikeable at the outset:
• The father is upset because he is working at an estate and the lord does not show up to admire his gardening skills, and this is about the 5th time he does not show up when he is supposed to. He is an absentee owner of the estate. So the father gets pissed off and breaks into the mansion so he can see how the other half lives. He sees a telescope and falls in love with it and looks at the stars. Sometime after that he takes a brief rest from his gardening work to admire what he has done and the head gardener tells him to stop gawking at this work but to get back to work. That's the last straw…Frances has had it with his hardscrabble life, and he and his four sons and his wife living in a hovel on the estate. He tells his wife, "we're leaving this crummy joint" and she says no and they get in a big fight and he hits her and she falls to the ground. Well, if that is not the tie that binds a protagonist to a reader I don't know what is! She gets up and leaves the hovel. He then 1) runs to the mansion and takes the telescope and then 2) takes a wheel barrow and dumps leaves and dung into the head gardener's thatched house and then 3) takes whatever belongings they have in the hovel and puts them on a cart and then 4) sets fire to their hovel and then 5) goes back to the mansion and sets the library in the mansion (where the telescope was before she took it) on fire, and then 6) takes off with his sons with their horses and cart for god-knows-where and who gives a damn where his wife is. I guess he was having a bad hair day.

• One big theme of the novel is that Teige has a "way with horses" (that is so stated in the inside of book jacket). So later on in life he gets a job in a stable training horses and turning them into racing horses or diagnosing their illnesses ' the horses and stables and land are owned by a rich man who has a beautiful niece (uh-oh). Well, Teige is smitten by her but he is only a stable boy, and she has told him that, but what the hell. One night he climbs the outer walls of the two-story mansion and creeps into a hallway window and finds out where she is sleeping and just stares at her. Well, she has already taken a liking to him but she tells him they will never get married but he can kiss her hand. And he comes back every night for I guess a month and does that. And then she takes off all her clothes one night and asks him if he finds her attractive. And then he gets called away on a family emergency and when he comes back a year or two later heaven forbid but she is married. Well, under normal circumstance that would stop a person like me from climbing up the two-story mansion and creeping into a window and going to the room where her husband and her are sleeping. But not Teige…that is what he does. She wakes up and says "if they find out you are here, they will kill you" but goes in the hallway with him and kisses her. Some time after that he comes back and he breaks the window and they end up screwing (sorry) in the next room to her husband and she leaves her husband for Teige. So this is supposed to be a believable story?! (hide spoiler)]