Greetings, dear reader. And thanks for stopping by for what is Part Two, and in effect the conclusion, of my assessment feature on Lee Child and his bestselling primary protagonist Jack Reacher. We continue to look at parallels between the writer and his protagonist but in a less obvious way than the Part One.
Now, as far as storytelling and writing go, right from the very first story ever written until this minute, the various aspects of a story, like plots and their devices, and the scale, and the direction and the style of writing a story, have all evolved with time. And the reason why it is so difficult to write something that is fresh and exclusive is because when you write a story, a book, a novel in 2017, there is this thing that I like to call the “Air-Library”. In my mind, it is a library up in the sky, or maybe the internet now, that contains every story ever written before the one you just got done putting down on paper yesterday. Take the volume and weight of that collective and you will find that no story is entirely new and original. Simply because it cannot be.
Take this feature you are currently reading. I wrote it all down on a blank page and edited and formatted it all firsthand just yesterday, but I’m sure there are a hundred other posts, better or worse, but just like this one out there. Hell, some of them I’ve had to read myself as part of my research.
And so a good story is, well…just a really good story in itself, yes. But, as they say, it also can be just the way you tell it, i.e. the ‘narrative’.
The point is simply no matter how good you are or try to be, especially with a thing like writing, there will always be similarities to something that came before, even if you weren’t aware of that something.
Reacher is distinct–in his net individuality and his gross universality; both physically and psychologically; in action, reaction, and interaction. He has a background and backstory of his own. He has his own way of doing things, things like a complex investigation and all the gathering of information through inspection and interrogation; or things like asserting himself to an absolute, definitive level. This includes Reacher warning some people verbally [sometimes with genuine concern, sometimes with a simple harsh threat], by beating some people up without remorse, and shooting some others in the head while being equally cold and calm himself, or simply flirting over the phone with a woman he’s never seen face to face.
Still, despite the level of distinguishing detail that goes into all of this, is Reacher an entirely original character? Not really. Take the implication I made in my previous post about the Reacher books essentially being new-age westerns. Just like Batman might as well be an updated, modern version of Zorro of this current age, similarly Reacher might as well be a Jack Schaeffer’s Shane who travelled through time to get to this present. In fact, Worth Dying For [2010] the fifteenth book in the Reacher series is dangerously close to Schaeffer’s classic.
Now, is this Child’s fault? Hardly. In fact, Child admits it himself:
“…And so [as to where did Reacher come from] I think the only sensible answer is [that Reacher came] from what I’d read before. All your life you read stuff, and there’s a character that has showed up throughout history in all various contexts all the way back to the medieval myths…the Scandinavian myths, the Anglo-Saxon myths; this [character of] mysterious stranger.”
-Lee Child, in a conversation with writer Stephen King
Full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PaxX-DTGo0&t=1690s
In keeping with the western themes, Child likens Reacher to:
“…That classic character…you see him all the time in Zane Grey stories: The rider who comes in off the range at exactly the crucial time, and in exchange for a woman-cooked meal, unsheaths his rifle, takes care of a problem, and rides of into the sunset.”
Lee Child in conversation with Rick Kleffel at Googleplex
Full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08h1NhtgGa8
Now, Reacher is a massive guy: He’s six-feet-five in height, weighs 220 pounds, with a 50-inch chest like a metal gate, hands like saucer-plates, shoulders like basketballs, built like a greyhound; and he’s hardened from a lifetime of street-fights as a kid, and later, from combat in the army. On several occasions in the books, the room goes quiet when he walks in, and people move out of his way without any prompt. Physically, Reacher is almost invincible. Of all the things out there, how and why did Child choose this particular image for Reacher’s physical self?
“The greatest paradigm in history is David versus Goliath. I thought: Suppose the good guy is actually Goliath…?!”
Lee Child in conversation with Brian Curtis
Full Interview: http://grantland.com/features/lee-child-jim-grant-jack-reacher/
And that idea is quite apparent in this statement: “I don’t care about the little guy. I just hate the big guy. I hate big smug people who think they can get away with things.” – Jack Reacher in Persuader
That is Jack Reacher’s distinguished voice.
Now, for Lee Child and his distinguished style…
How does a British man write down twenty-one novels that are so quintessentially American? Be it the large cities like the vibrant and restless New York and forever-bustling Washington, or the nearly empty ghost towns like Margrave in Georgia and Echo County in Texas, be it the deep forested Montana or the Colorado desert, the imagery is alive and breathing, described in a way that you are there on the scene, more so looking over the characters’ shoulder, even from your bedroom.
Ask him about the visual aesthetic in the Reacher books as such, and Child plays the ‘being a foreigner’ aspect right up:
“It is fascination generally. Being an outsider, I see everything with a fresh eye. And that is valuable I think. So I gloss over nothing because I’ve never seen it before. Any place I go to, I’m seeing for the first time probably, and it forms an impression and I see the parts other people no longer see. And that really comes through.”
-Lee Child in conversation with Rick Kleffel
Apart from that, he married a New York girl called Jane, whom he met in college in Britain. He then visited America exactly one hundred times since 1974, before finally moving there in 1998. He point out that his wife would read his early drafts and cut out the “British-isms”.
“She called herself the Committee on Un-American Activities.”
– Lee Child in a conversation with Bryan Curtis
Child describes his work a deliberately commercial and decidedly American. And at the end of the day, the idea is simply not to stick to a formula. And with Child, one can vouch there simply isn’t one.
Killing Floor was written in first person. Child wrote the next book Die Trying in third person, “to avoid writing the same book again.” And so he keeps doing the occasional switch from time to time. Some Reacher books are thus in first person, some are in third person. Similarly, there are books set in the time when Reacher is a drifter having left the army, and there are books where he is still a soldier, and we get to see Reacher in action in uniform. Child calls this a series within a series. To that, I would like to add what I call ‘The Susan Turner Series’; which are four Reacher books and four separate stories that take place almost immediately after one another in consecutive sequence.
It is really the way Child writes his books. The textbook says: Outline. Know the start, know the finish, and then map it out. Child doesn’t do any of that…
“I have literally no concept. I don’t know what the story’s going to be about…or how it is going to end; I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next line. And I don’t want to know, because for me the story is the magic and if I outlined it…I’d know how it ends and I’d be bored with it. It would be like doing it twice. I only want to do it once. So I start at the beginning with a good idea for the beginning and I see what happens. And what happens is like real life. We don’t know. We have no idea what’s going to happen… And that’s how I write, page by page; it is all new to me.”
-Lee Child in conversation with Rick Kleffel
This is probably why no two Reacher books are alike. Simply because they cannot be. Not with the way Child writes. And in what one can only describe as perhaps the most subtle parallel between writer and protagonist, the Child writes is very akin to Reacher wandering about the USA, aimless until it simply isn’t. As for the results, Child and Reacher are what Forbes Magazine declared as the “strongest brand in publishing” in 2014.
Where Killing Floor is set in a ghost town with a tiny police department, Child amps it up in Die Trying, involving the FBI, and a secret pseudo-State ready to wage war on America. In Nothing To Lose [2008], we get an entire town that will kill any passing stranger just for setting foot on their ground. And in the very next book, Gone Tomorrow [2009], we get a possible suicide bomber on the New York subway and a government mishap that needs to remain under wraps.
The sole aim is “to not give the reader what they liked last year but what they’re going to like this year.”
The stakes keep getting progressively higher and higher, with the last two books. Make Me [2015] is simply the darkest, most disconcerting Reacher book yet. And Night School [2016] is perhaps the biggest in scale.
Even so, the question still stands: Who is Jack Reacher? To which the only true answer would be…I don’t exactly know. I’d rather ask the question: What is Jack Reacher? To me, he is a lot of things; an updated legendary archetype that that will go down in history as a new classic; one of the most impressive characters of modern fiction; a key contribution and a major influence on the very art and science of writing; and a very important part of my bookshelf; and these are just a few of them. Primarily though, at least in my head, Reacher is simply a silhouette. A very real silhouette, that Jim Grant created. And Lee Child? He’s a silhouette too. A very real silhouette, that Jack Reacher created.
By Valentine Gonsalves
Update:
Reacher is already on a bus, set to return in Child’s new novel. The twenty-second Reacher book is indeed done and set for release. Titled ‘The Midnight Line‘, Reacher checks into a new town in Wisconsin. This November.
For an exclusive preview excerpt currently up on Lee Child’s official website, click the link below and scroll to the bottom of the page: http://www.leechild.com/books/the-midnight-line.php
Important Note: Meanwhile, new updates and posts on this blog, Dissection Library, coming next month; will include a book review for John le Carre’s Our Kind of Traitor and an original short story by me 🙂 🙂
Dissection Library 