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Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher in the Amazon TV series Reacher
Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher in the Amazon TV series Reacher

BooksNovember 29, 2017

What makes Jack Reacher books so damn good?

Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher in the Amazon TV series Reacher
Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher in the Amazon TV series Reacher

Danyl McLauchlan celebrates the string of masterpieces written by Lee Child.

About 15 years ago I was having a drink with an old friend, and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by Dire Straits started playing on the bar’s stereo. My friend had very elevated taste in music and I wanted to impress him so I said, “Oh god no, not Dire Straits,” because Dire Straits was – and is – a popular mainstream band despised by most musical sophisticates. But, to my disappointment, my friend disagreed with me. “Dire Straits are fine. Mark Knopfler,” he added, after a moment’s reflection, “is good at creating characters in his songs.” Which, I realised, listening to the song for a few seconds and thinking about other Dire Straits songs I’d spent years performatively hating, is true.

The lesson I took from that is that when something is insanely popular – a writer, a movie, a musician, whatever – people are often reacting to something of value in the work. Which might seem obvious but if, like me, you have a contrarian impulse to reject anything popular, possibly to disguise your own devastating sense of inferiority, I don’t know, I don’t know you, and you give into that impulse, you can deprive yourself of a lot of simple pleasures. To those people I say: give mainstream popular culture a chance.

Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels are insanely popular. There are 21 in the series; he writes a new one every year, and in 21 years he’s sold an estimated 100 million books. Someone buys one every nine seconds. He has the highest return readership rate of any bestselling author: if you read one Reacher novel you’re likely to read more. This is my fourth, or fifth, or maybe sixth. They blur into each other.

Reacher books occupy a similar cultural niche to Dire Straits: they’re the books a stereotypical dad gets for Father’s Day, hence deeply unfashionable in literary circles. When I told a couple of writers I know I was reading a Jack Reacher novel they looked physically ill. Let’s be generous and assume Child is doing something right. But what?

Lee Child on the red carpet (Photo by Paul Cunningham – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)

Jack Reacher’s hands are as “big as a supermarket chicken.” He’s a huge guy: six and a half feet tall. He’s a graduate of West Point and a former major in the Military Police. Reacher can beat anyone in a fight and defeat any number of simultaneous attackers. He’s an expert with every type of firearm and he never misses. He knows basically everything in every area of human knowledge – thanks to his military training – and where there are gaps in his education his intuition is never wrong. Reacher has no responsibilities: no family, no job – but he always has enough money to eat at a truck stop and rent a cheap motel room. He’s haunted by his past, but not in the sense that he has depression or anxiety or anything like that. No, Reacher is haunted in a romantic, harmless, tough way, and so he Walks The Earth, meeting people and getting into adventures. He always knows the time but never wears a watch.

Child’s 2017 Reacher book, The Midnight Line, starts with Reacher getting off a bus in a small town in the US Midwest, strolling past a pawn shop and seeing a woman’s West Point class ring in the window. Reacher knows you don’t graduate from West Point and then pawn your class ring for a couple of bucks: his gut tells him that the woman who owned that ring is in trouble. He spends the rest of the book tracking down the ring’s owner, hitching his way around the post-industrial Midwest and into the wilds of Wyoming, confronting biker gangs and drug dealers and beating the shit out of all of them until he finds the girl. Every weapon and vehicle Reacher encounters is described in fetishistic detail: make, model, age, condition. The books have a huge readership in the US and UK armed forces, and Child reports that this audience pounces on any inaccuracy. Child himself is not a military man: his real name is James Grant, a British former TV writer. He worked on Cracker and Brideshead Revisited!

It would be easy to say that Reacher is a male fantasy, but when Child is questioned about this he points out that two-thirds of his readers are women (you don’t sell 100 million books without a keen understanding of your product’s target market). So maybe Reacher functions as a crossover fantasy. He’s a modern manifestation of an ancient archetype, Child explains: a knight-errant, a wandering ronin or mysterious stranger from a western who rides into town and solves a problem and then disappears into the sunset.

Child is a pretty good stylist. There are lots of alleged rules out there about how to write good prose and how to structure stories – avoid cliche, show don’t tell, omit needless words – and Child ignores all of them, as most contemporary bestselling authors seem happy to do. He’s fine with cliche, and Reacher patiently re-explains the book’s plot to every character he meets (“You see this ring?”). But he’s good at tone, capturing the truck stops, diners, and hollowed out towns of the disintegrating post-industrial Midwest, and the dirt roads, abandoned farms, dying towns and desolate horizons of Wyoming.

And the action scenes are brilliant. Years ago when I was writing my first novel and searching the internet for literary advice I stumbled across a list of rules for writing erotic fiction, and one of them was “Never write a lesbian threesome,” which, when you consider the technical complexity of communicating such a scene to the reader without boring or confusing them, is genuinely good advice for aspiring writers and can be generalised out to “don’t write scenes in which multiple characters simultaneously interact with each other non-verbally”.

But rules like that are for beginners. How could Jack Reacher beat up seven members of a biker gang at once outside a bar without simultaneously interacting with them non-verbally? Child takes us inside Reacher’s head as he maps out his strategy for crippling his doomed opponents, and we always know the layout of the fight: who is where, and which character is kicking whose kidneys, then pivoting to break whose nose. There’s an undeniable level of technical skill on display. You always know Reacher is going to win: the tension comes from seeing how.

I was half-way through The Midnight Line when George Saunders won the Booker Prize for his first novel Lincoln in the Bardo. Saunders exists at the opposite end of the literary spectrum from Lee Child: his novel is experimental, brilliant, ostentatiously drenched in postmodern literary theory. But for all his formal invention the themes of Saunders’ novel sit very safely in the mainstream of contemporary progressivism: racism is evil, homophobia is evil, sexism is evil, slave owners are evil; racist sexist slave-owning rapists are evil. Which, okay, sure: but literary fiction is supposed to be challenging and the function of Saunders book seems to be the uncomplicated validation of the worldview of everyone likely to buy a copy in a campus bookstore.

It struck me, reading the Saunders coverage and then returning to The Midnight Line, that although the prose and structure are simpler, the moral world of Jack Reacher is more complex. On one level Child’s books are deeply conservative: respect for the military and those who serve in it are bedrock values. Reacher is prone to speeches about duty and loyalty and honour and sacred oaths and the US constitution, often delivered to characters he’s only just met, who either react well to these values (‘I got me a son in the infantry’) and give him the help he needs to progress to the next stage of the plot, or reject them, prompting Reacher to hospitalise or kill them. He’s a classic vigilante, solving problems and defeating evils that the justice system, crippled by its institutions and rules and due process and respect for human rights, etc, cannot hope to confront.

But, sneakily, these classic conservative tropes act as vehicles for progressive arguments. The Midnight Line is about the opioid epidemic in the US, and this is explicitly linked to capitalism and corporate greed. The drug addicts in the story are sympathetic victims rather than villains; former soldiers sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, horribly wounded in wars the book suggests were pointless foreign policy blunders, failed by their leadership and left to eke out lives of misery and addiction.

Child claims that Reacher is “post-feminist”. (Remember when Obama was elected in 2008 and numerous pundits announced that America was now “post-racial”?) What he means is that Reacher treats women as equals which, I’m no expert on social justice theory, but I think just makes him a feminist. “Post-feminist” is an astute marketing move though: it’s not going to alienate Child’s large military and conservative readership, or draw attention to the way this huge, tough American super-soldier of vigilante justice consistently advocates for progressive values. When he’s talking about US foreign policy or drug addiction or equality or capitalism Reacher sounds less like a military man and more like, well, a writer who worked on Brideshead Revisited.

We occupy an increasingly fragmented culture in which different political tribes consume different news, different music and different books and form increasingly incompatible views of the world. The Jack Reacher novels are one of the rare cultural commodities that spans that divide, read by both Malcolm Gladwell and the members of Seal Team Six. Maybe the reason such a diversity of readers respond to these books is that, unlike the superstars of contemporary literary fiction, Jack Reacher actually challenges them to think.


Midnight Line by Lee Child (Bantam, $38) is available at Unity Books.

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BooksNovember 28, 2017

Announcing the longlist for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand national book awards: all the finalists, and some passing remarks

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Yet another Spinoff Review of Books exclusive as we break the 5am embargo on the longlist of the 2018 Ockham New Zealand national book awards by 60 seconds: the following story went up on our site at 4:59am.

With some ado here and there, below is the full list of the 10 longlisted finalists in the 2018 Ockham New Zealand national book awards.

Fiction

  • The New Animals by Pip Adam (Victoria University Press)
  • The Beat of the Pendulum by Catherine Chidgey (Victoria University Press)
  • The Earth Cries Out by Bonnie Etherington (Penguin Random House)
  • Salt Picnic by Patrick Evans (Victoria University Press)
  • Sodden Downstream by Brannavan Gnanalingam (Lawrence & Gibson)
  • Heloise by Mandy Hager (Penguin Random House)
  • Iceland by Dominic Hoey (Steele Roberts)
  • Baby by Annaleese Jochems (Victoria University Press)
  • Tess by Kirsten McDougall (Victoria University Press)
  • Five Strings by Apirana Taylor (Anahera Press)

Passing remarks by Spinoff Review of Books editor, Steve Braunias: “Huzzah! This is an exciting list, one of the most inventive and open for years. Judges have made especially good calls in choosing Baby, the electrifying debut by Annaleese Jochems, and three novels from independent publishers – Iceland, the Grey Lynn bohemian rhapsody by Dominic Hoey, Brannavan Gnanalingam’s phantasmogoric novel set in the Hutt Valley, Sodden Downstream, and Apirana Taylor’s Five Strings, his hardboiled, poetic yarn about two down and outs. It’s refreshing to see that kind of dirty realism on a New Zealand fiction longlist alongside the wild imaginings of Jochems, and Pip Adam’s The New Animals.

“A shame, thoughto overlook Fiona Farrell’s affecting novel about the Christchurch earthquake, Decline and Fall on Savage Street. There’s really no one in her class on this list.”

Illustrated non-fiction

  • New China Eyewitness: Roger Duff, Rewi Alley and the Art of Museum Diplomacy edited by James Beattie and Richard Bullen (Canterbury University Press)
  • Strangers Arrive: Emigrés and the Arts in New Zealand, 1930-1980 by Leonard Bell (Auckland University Press)
  • Good-bye Maoriland: The Songs and Sounds of New Zealand’s Great War by Chris Bourke (Auckland University Press)
  • Teenagers: The Rise of Youth Culture in New Zealand by Chris Brickell (Auckland University Press)
  • Tuai: A Traveller in Two Worlds by Alison Jones and Kuni Kaa Jenkins (Bridget Williams Books)
  • Ten x Ten: Art at Te Papa edited by Athol McCredie (Te Papa Press)
  • Undreamed of … 50 years of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship by Priscilla Pitts and Andrea Hotere (Otago University Press)
  • Tōtara: A Natural and Cultural History by Philip Simpson (Auckland University Press)
  • Gordon Walters: New Vision by Zara Stanhope (commissioning editor), Lucy Hammonds, Laurence Simmons, Julia Waite (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and Dunedin Public Art Gallery)
  • The Face of Nature: An Environmental History of the Otago Peninsula by Jonathan West (Otago University Press)

Passing remarks: “Huzzah! Auckland University Press produce the best-looking books in New Zealand, and deserve their four nominations. Te Papa used to produce the best-looking books in New Zealand, before its press got fucked over; nice but sad to see their one, lovely nomination, Ten X Ten. No room, disgracefully, for Aberhart Starts Here, by Laurence Aberhart, the best book of New Zealand photography of 2017. Can the judging panel in future include a visual artist? Someone who knows how to make a beautiful picture?”

Poetry

  • Flow: Whanganui River Poems by Airini Beautrais (Victoria University Press)
  • Anchor Stone by Tony Beyer (Cold Hub Press)
  • The Internet of Things by Kate Camp (Victoria University Press)
  • The Ones Who Keep Quiet by David Howard (Otago University Press)
  • Tightrope by Selina Tusitala Marsh (Auckland University Press)
  • Fully Clothed and So Forgetful by Hannah Mettner (Victoria University Press)
  • Night Horse by Elizabeth Smither (Auckland University Press)
  • What is Left Behind by Tom Weston (Steele Roberts)
  • Rāwāhi by Briar Wood (Anahera Press)
  • The Yield by Sue Wootton (Otago University Press)

Passing remarks: “Huzzah! If only for judges showing common sense and choosing Tightrope, by the newly minted poet laureate Selina Tusitala Marsh; her book was the poetry event of the year. But it’s a curious list. It doesn’t allow for strong collections by Bill Manhire and Fleur Adcock, and overlooks Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s particularly lively book of poems of and about Bob Dylan. Meanwhile, I’d like to issue an appeal to the publishers of Briar Wood, Tony Beyer, and David Howard: please send me a selection of their verse, for consideration in the Spinoff’s wildly popular feature, The Friday Poem. Word document is best. My email is stephen11@xtra.co.nz. That’d be great if you could. Cheers!”

General non-fiction

  • Dancing with the King: The Rise and Fall of the King Country, 1864-1885 by Michael Belgrave (Auckland University Press)
  • Tāngata Ngāi Tahu / People of Ngai Tahu edited by Helen Brown and Takerei Norton (Te Rūnanga Ngāi Tahu and Bridget Williams Books)
  • Fearless: The Extraordinary Untold Story of New Zealand’s Great War Airmen by Adam Claasen (Massey University Press)
  • Phoney Wars: New Zealand Society in the Second World War by Stevan Eldred-Grigg and Hugh Eldred-Grigg (Otago University Press)
  • The 9th Floor: Conversations with Five New Zealand Prime Ministers by Guyon Espiner and Tim Watkin (Bridget Williams Books)
  • Cleansing the Colony: Transporting Convicts from New Zealand to Van Diemen’s Land by Kristyn Harman (Otago University Press)
  • Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds by Anne Salmond (Auckland University Press)
  • Drawn Out by Tom Scott (Allen & Unwin)
  • Driving to Treblinka: A Long Search for a Lost Father by Diana Wichtel (Awa Press)
  • A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington by Redmer Yska (Otago University Press)

Passing remarks: “This is one of the dreariest lists in years. Judges find no room for my book The Man Who Ate Lincoln Road, and prefer, for example, a boring radio transcript, The 9th Floor. Much else on the list are university textbooks of negligible literary merit, although it also includes the two best New Zealand non-fiction books of the year by a long distance – Diana Wichtel’s harrowing memoir Driving to Treblinka, and Redmer Yska’s dazzling psychogeography of Wellington and Katherine Mansfield, A Strange Beautiful Excitement. These are the two titles you want to buy someone this Christmas. Get thee at once to Unity Books! You’ll find them on the non-fiction stack, next to my book The Man Who Ate Lincoln Road. Huzzah!”


Driving to Treblinka by Diana Wichtel (Awa Press, $45), Strange Beautiful Excitement by Redmer Yska (Otago University Press, $40), Aberhart Starts Here by Laurence Aberhart and Lara Strongman(Christchurch Art Gallery, $40), The Man Who Ate Lincoln Road (Luncheon Sausage Books, $25) and other great New Zealand reads are available at Unity Books.

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