All posts tagged Jack Reacher

All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson (1999)

Nothing dates quicker than the future. All Tomorrow’s Parties is the title of a song by the Velvet Underground recorded in 1967. The choice of a Velvet Underground track as the title of a novel supposedly set in a hi-tech future confirms the sense that Gibson, born in 1948, despite being credited with the invention of futuristic visions of cyberspace and cyberpunk, in fact has a very 1960s/70s mentality, all dark glasses and leather jackets and ripped t-shirts.

Gibson is the Lou Reed of science fiction.

All Tomorrow’s Parties

This is the third in Gibson’s ‘Bridge Trilogy’ and reunites us with key characters from the earlier two novels, notably:

  • Berry Rydell (security guard and protagonist of Virtual Light)
  • derelict computer hacker Colin Laney (the protagonist of Idoru)
  • Shinya Yamazaki, self-described ‘student of existential sociology’ who appears in both the previous books
  • former bicycle courier Chevette

It’s ten or 20 years in the future, after a big earthquake (nicknamed ‘the Little Big One’, page 160) hit California, resulting in the state officially dividing into two administrations, NoCal and SoCal.

The earthquake rendered the famous Golden Gate bridge so unstable that it was closed to traffic and very quickly became a shanty town, a favela, people building shacks and shops out of spare parts and random kit on the lower and main levels of the bridge, then slowly building above these, using the massive cables and struts as superstructure to create a slum stretching up into the sky.

It had all been open then, just girders and railing and deck: now it was this tunnel, everything patched together out of junk, used lumber, plastic, whatever people could find, all of it lashed up however anybody could get it to stay, it looked like… (page 185)

The Bridge is populated by all kinds of lowlife, criminals, popup shops, computer hackers, fast food joints, seedy micro-hotels, wasted dudes trying to sell you drugs and so on. It sounds a lot like the rundown parts of New York in the 1970s, because William Gibson is the Lou Reed of science fiction. Hey man, take a walk on the wild side.

The characters use a would-be street slang which sometimes feels curiously dated. When the character Tessa refers to nightclubs she knows, she includes one named ‘Cognitive Dissidence’, quite a heavy-handed play on the modish phrase, ‘cognitive dissonance’, like the comically themed nightclubs in Idoru.

But when her friend Chevette says, ‘Yeah, she knows ‘”Cog Diss”‘ – the books seems to assume that abbreviating Cognitive Dissidence to Cog Diss indicates how wildly street and hip and in the know and down with the kids Chevette is, but – it made me laugh at its crapness. Increasingly, I am associating Gibson not with some far-out digital future, but with Lou Reed and ageing Dad Rock (def: ‘music played by old white dudes’).

This impression is bolstered by the role played in all these novels by:

  1. the very old-tech format of TV shows (Rydell wanted to be on a cop TV show, Tessa makes TV documentaries)
  2. guitar music. In fact the novel includes an actual rock band, a collection of ageing white dudes led by one Buell Creedmore (see below) and includes other (fictional) rock bands with stupid names, which Gibson has referred to throughout the trilogy, such as ‘Chrome Koran’ and ‘Blue Ahmed’

This is the seventh Gibson novel I’ve read and certain elements are a fixture:

  1. Something is about to happen, something big, he can’t tell you what it is but it’s gonna be big. Thus Laney, the guy who was experimented on at his orphanage (page 71) and as a result has developed a supernatural ability to recognise patterns in the vast reams of data flowing through the net, he knows something is coming, something which will change everything.
  2. The basic mindset is 1940s film noir, hardboiled crime genre, Raymond Chandler for the internet age. Guys are tough, dames are tough as well, but generally need rescuing by tougher guys. Thus the two main male characters in this novel are Berry Rydell, the tough security guard we met in the previous novels of the trilogy, and an even harder tough guy, a silent assassin who thinks, speaks and moves with Zen detachment, a man with no name (lol, really, I’m not kidding) until we do, finally, get his name, towards the end of the book. But for most of the text we are kept wondering, ‘Who is he?’ ‘What is he seeking?’
  3. The novel is made up of four or five storylines, each focusing on a lead character, which run separately and distinctly throughout the book but with the strong suggestion that they’re all going to link up somehow, towards the end, which is also when the Big Thing which has been hinted at throughout will finally take place.

The first and third of these elements in particular, make for a very strong narrative grip or attraction. All through the book we’re kept on tenterhooks wondering what The Big Thing is going to turn out to be, although with the nagging suspicion that, as with a number of the previous novels, The Big Thing might actually turn out to be a disappointment (as, for example, the vague and underwhelming marriage of a pop singer and a virtual woman in Idoru).

The book is 277 pages long and divided into 73 chapters giving an average of 3.8 pages per chapter, although many of them only run to 1 or 2 pages. That’s to say, the narrative moves at pace, cleverly constructed to jump between the activities of the four or five leading characters. These are:

Berry Rydell

Rydell is a rough, tough, handsome man, ‘all muscle and long legs’ (page 181). He was a cop back in Knoxville, Tennessee, till he killed a drugged-up abuser who was firing randomly into a closet where he’d locked his girlfriend’s kids. Forced to quit the police, Rydell joined a security operation, IntenSecure. Then he was hired by a TV show which turned nobodies into celebrities in order to knock them down, but became increasingly unhappy with it, specially after he was unable to prevent a woman the show was persecuting from killing herself. So he quit TV and ended up working as security in a hotel. Here he was spotted and recommended for a job as security to a pop star in Japan, Rez, who was planning to ‘marry’ a totally digital woman, and this was the plot of the previous novel in the series, Idoru.

We learn that after the events described in Idoru Rydell made it back to America, to Los Angeles, where he was working as security, again, this time for a chain of convenience stores called Lucky Dragon, owned by a Korean. For a while he lived with Chevette who he hooked up with during the previous novel and thought he was going to feature in a documentary about hard-done-by cops, made by the Cops In Trouble series. But slowly all his hopes fizzled away, and Rydell became so sad Chevette that left him (page 182) and he got the convenience store job.

It is here that, one day, he takes a phone call from Colin Laney, who was the one who fixed him up with the job in Japan, and now tells him he’s got a job for him up in San Francisco.

So Rydell quits the Lucky Dragon job and drives up to Frisco. He does so in a carshare arranged by his fellow security cop, Durius. The guy sharing the car is an aggressive drunk named Buell Creedmore. He’s a pain in the butt and when Rydell arrives in SF and parks the car, we think he’s walking away from Creedmore, but Creedmore continues to turn up through the book and we discover he is quite a decent country and western singer who sings with ‘legendary’ guitarist Randall James Branch Shoats from Mobile, Alabama (page 100).

Colin Laney

Laney was one of a cohort of kids at an orphanage in Kentucky who were experimented on without their knowledge or consent. They were given an experimental drug, 5-SB.

‘5-SB allows the apprehension of nodal points, discontinuities in the texture of information. They indicate emergent change, but not what that change will be.’ (page 194)

Its effect was to make Laney supersensitive to the flow and shape of information flooding through the (still fairly primitive) internet (page 75).

At one point in his career Laney was a quantitative analyst for Slitscan, a tabloid TV show ‘of quite monumental viciousness’ (page 222). In Idoru he was hired as co-ordinator of internet data helping to create and curate the digital woman. Now we learn the idoru has left Rez who, in mourning has undertaken a rock tour of the Kombinat states (i.e. the old Soviet Union) and Laney, ill with probable tuberculosis, poor and decrepit, has gone into hiding in a large cardboard box hidden in the bowels of Shinjuku station, which he rents off a wordless Japanese man who spends all day silently making models.

This is where Shinya Yamazaki, an ‘existential sociologist’ who featured in both the previous novels, tracks him down and tries to bring him antibiotics and food. But Laney is too obsessed to eat. Right at the start of the book he tells Yamazaki that the datasets are building towards a seismic change. ‘What’s going to change?’ asks Yamazaki. Everything, replies Laney, thus creating the sense of suspense which keeps the reader turning the next 250 pages.

We also learn what happened to Rez and the idoru after the end of the previous novel. Basically, Laney was hired in the period covered by Idoru to facilitate the ‘marriage’ of the rock star Rez and the ’emergent digital being’, Rei Toei. That novel ended with the couple getting ‘married’ and going off to a newly-built circular island in Tokyo Bay. Now we learn that after that, Laney was kept on to educate this digital being, Rei Toei but that, as she grew and learned more about the world, she grew away from Rez. Laney realised he was falling in love with this being made entirely of data and so, one day, quit his job (pages 163 to 164). Soon afterwards he heard Rei had left the island, the marriage was over, and so Laney went into hiding, hiding out in the cardboard box buried deep in Shinjuku station.

Laney now devotes himself all day long to being the unfiltered ‘eye’ through which all the data in the world passes, via DatAmerica. And he sees a massive change coming. And the change is something to do with Cody Harwood, Machiavellian CEO of Harwood Levine, the most powerful PR company in the world.

The Man with no name

He wears a long coat, a loden coat. Round-lenses glasses which hide his eyes. He was in the military. He wastes no movement or word. He is ‘Lean and concise’ (page 220). He follows the Tao. He believes only in the moment.

We meet him in a chapter where he is tailed onto the Bridge by a couple of lowlife drug addicts. When they try to mug him he kills them both with silent movement of his hands, holding a super-sharp knife, too quick to see or defend from. He is watched by the muggers’ young mute hanger-on, known as Silencio because he doesn’t talk. No name takes Silencio to a diner and buys him fruit shakes and, when the boy is fascinated by the old wristwatch he’s wearing, gives it to him.

In the middle section of the book we see the man with no name in his spartan hotel room performing his secret assassin exercises, or sharpening his super-sharp assassin’s knife in ritualised movements. Despite the cheesiness of all this I couldn’t help finding it at the same time everso ‘cool’, as it is designed to be.

Fontaine

Fontaine is ‘an angular black man whose graying hair is twisted into irregular branches that hang like the arms of a dusty houseplant in need of water’ (page 159). He is harassed by his two wives Tourmaline and Clarisse. He keeps a popup second-hand shop on the Bridge, specialising in gadgets, wristwatches a speciality. It was Fontaine who cobbled together a home-made stairlift up to the shack belonging to a man named Skinner, up on a higher level of the favella, and whic Chevette, who lived with much older Skinner, used to use to take her bike down to ground level to carry out her job as a bicycle courier, all of this described in the first of the trilogy, Virtual Light.

One morning Fontaine notices Silencio’s nose pressed against the glass. He lets him in and, after some initial nervousness about whether he’s a burglar, lets him stay, starts buying him meals, lets him sleep out back – not least because Silencio lets Fontaine have the awesome watch which the Man with No Name gave him.

Soon Silencio gravitates from staring at Fontaine’s watch collection to being given a pair of eyephones and scanning at speed through all the watches available at all the auctions round the world. Silencio starts to talk but all he does is repeat the technical specifications of the watches he’s looking at.

Chevette

In the previous novels we met Chevette-Marie Washington in her capacity of bicycle courier and carer for the ageing Skinner, who had taken her in and fed her when she was young and homeless. Then she had an affair and lived with rough tough Berry Rydell for a while. As this novel opens she is living in a house rented out to students on the coast of Los Angeles. The house is fenced off from the beach where there has been some kind of disastrous unnamed chemical ‘spill’.

Chevette’s main housemate is Tessa who’s Australian and a media sciences student at USC (page 32). Tessa wants to make a documentary about the Bridge using Chevette as a way in to its closed and secretive society. She regards the Bridge as ‘interstitial’, an adjective Chevette takes the piss out of for the rest of the book.

Tessa’s recently been playing with a camera on a small drone. Chevette has barely woken up before she and housemate Tessa spot a man snooping round the house. It is Carson, Chevette’s ex-boyfriend, smooth, handsome, in the media working for a show called ‘Real One’ (everyone works in TV in these novels). He was Chevette’s boyfriend till the night he hit her. She moved out and went into hiding in this abandoned beachfront property. Now he’s found her.

So to avoid Carson, the women sneak out the back way and round to Tessa’s van. She’s already packed. Chevette never unpacked. They slip into the van, fire the ignition and spurt away. Whither? Well, Tessa wants to make a doc about the Bridge so they head north, to NoCal and San Francisco.

Plot developments

These days Laney phones his mate Rydell at regular intervals. He instructs Rydell to contact his attorney, F.X. Tong, which he does via videoglasses. Rydell has a knackered pair given to him by the cashier at the Lonely Dragon, Miss Praisegod Satansbane (page 11). The ‘shades’ are originally from Brazil so when Rydell touches the instruction panel in the wing of the shades he often gets a street map of Rio and everything in Portuguese, but nothing’s perfect.

Through a bad connection Tong gives him instructions to use the ATM in the branch of the Lucky Dragon near the start of the Bridge, then go to the GlobEx franchise at the back, use the identity code Tong gives him and collect a package. All of which he does. The package is a couple of feet long, six inches square and very heavy. Rydell carries it further onto the Bridge, finds an anonymous popup hotel and greasy spoon, the Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl, which rents him a tiny room, really only a horizontal pod.

There’s more. Laney calls Rydell and tells him to go to a particular computer accessory shop and pick up some cables. It’s called Bad Sector and staffed by an enormous Chinese youth with an irritating under-moustache. He devises little robots which toddle around the shop counter and hand out and receive goods to and from customers.

Back in the pod Rydell finally unwraps the package to discover it contains a metal object like a thermos flask, figures out how to attach the cables, powers it up and… out appears a hologram of the emergent digital being from the previous novel, Rei Toei, beautiful, immaculate, seductive, very intelligent, and Rydell is entranced.

Chevette and Tessa arrive in San Francisco and park the van by the Bridge. They stroll around and into a bar where, by quite a big coincidence, there’s Buell Creedmore who is about to perform with ‘legendary’ guitarist Shoats. Before the performance has even begun, Chevette sees, by an even bigger coincidence, her feared ex, Carson, walk in,

Laney phones Rydell again, tells him the world is going to end. Well, the world as we know it (page 166). Laney is convinced the crisis will crystallise around a dude named Cody Harwood, a lean, rich head of a major public relations firm.

Separately, Laney becomes uneasily aware that someone is watching him when, in the dataflow, he is watching Harwood. He is shocked when two fellow hackers from Mexico City tell him it is Harwood watching him watching Harwood, because Harwood has himself taken the experimental drug 5-SB and so gained heightened awareness of the flows of information through the world’s datasets.

Laney’s informants from Mexico (Rooster and Klaus) tell him that Harwood is rich and has interests in a range of mega corporations including Nanofax AG of Geneva:

‘Nanofax AG offers a technology that digitally reproduces objects, physically, at a distance.’ (page 195)

So we know that Harwood has taken 5-SB and so has advanced nodal apprehension, and is installing Nanofax modules in every Lucky Dragon store, because he has a controlling interest in that franchise as well (page 209). But what’s he ultimately up to?

We see Harwood ordering minions to keep monitoring Laney and to find whoever it was who collected the package Laney had FedExed from Japan i.e. the thermos device which contains Rei Toei. Remember the two street hoodlums who the Man with No Name silently knifed earlier on? Now Laney phones Rydell and tells him to go to the crime scene. Why? Because it will trigger the next stage, though Laney doesn’t know what.

Rydell is tailed So Rydell goes along and, sure enough, Harwood has minicams monitoring the scene so immediately uses facial recognition to identify Rydell and access his entire past history. Harwood dispatches some toughs to tail him. Cut to Rydell being tailed for a few blocks across the Bridge, particularly by some guy in black with a scarf. He thinks he’s cleverly evaded them when he turns a corner and is punched so hard in the side by an enormous dud that he feels some ribs break. The big guy is shaping up for another punch when he goes quite, blank-faced, falls to his knees. The Man with No Name is behind him, has stabbed and killed him.

The bar with no name The Man with No Name marches Rydell away but as they pass the nightclub (with no name) Rydell takes the opportunity to nip inside. He arrives just as Buell Creedmore is finishing his set with Tessa and Chevette (Rydell’s ex) also there. So at about this point the reader sees the plotlines led by the various characters finally coming together. Even more so when, to provoke no-name, Rydell activates the thermos (which he carries everywhere with him) and Rei Toei appears in the middle of the crowded bar to everyone’s astonishment.

Shootout But at that moment the band ends its performance, Chevette leaves the light and sound console where she’s been with Tessa, goes down to the main floor to capture the mini-drones Tessa’s been using to film the performance when, to her amazement, she is spun round and punched really hard in the face. It is her ex, Carson the woman beater. He advances on her to hit her again but is pulled round and punched hard by… by Rydell, her other lover!

Dazed Chevette is amazed. But Carson gets to his feet and punches Rydell hard in the ribs and we know they’re broken so Rydell squeals with pain. At which point he is pushed out the way and Chevette sees the guy with the scarf who had been tailing Rydell and has now arrived in the bar, step forward and shoot Carson with a silenced gun. Now she knows she’s in some kind of dream.

Tessa, from up in the lighting control booth, turns the lights out in the bar and there’s a stampede, people getting hurt. Rei Toei is like a genie, a stream of white light tormenting the shooter while Rydell in great pain lifts Chevette and helps her to a side door which they kick open and emerge into a street filling up with screaming punters. Chevette runs, Rydell limps after her, then both of them are stopped by the magical appearance of the Man with No Name carrying the thermos, which Rydell in the general panic had forgotten.

Fontaine’s Next thing we know they are beating on the locked door of Fontaine’s watch shop. Fontaine wakes (it’s the middle of the night) and reluctantly lets them in. In fact – we realise with a start – it is meant to be only 24 hours since the Man with No Name killed those two muggers on the bridge. Anyway, Fontaine recognises Chevette as the pretty young thing who lived in an apartment above his and who looked after Skinner before she left for LA. And the Man with No Name calmly recognises Silencio, who is also woken up by the noise, as the boy he took to the milk bar and gave his watch to.

So the gang’s all here. All the major characters have been brought together, with 40 pages or so of the novel left to go. So what is this Big Thing which we’ve been promised throughout the text?

The Man with No Name explains that Harwood has hired mercenaries to capture Rydell because he knows he has something important to Laney but isn’t sure what. Also, that the mercs will kill anyone who stands in their way. He asks for Fontaine’s gun and explains he’s going out to kill as many of the mercenaries as he can, that everyone else should remain holed up in Fontaine’s shop, and disappears through the door into the night.

There’s a shootout. The Man with No Name, inevitably, kills two of the mercs because that’s what Clint Eastwood types do. Rydell, crouching in Fontaine’s inner room, asks Fontaine if he has a weapon and the latter discloses a vicious chain-gun, owned by Fontaine’s lawyer (a paranoid refugee from the African Union) which he has hidden in a wall recess. They get it out, Rydell steps into the shop proper, someone fires off a bevy of automatic rifle, Ryfell aims in that direction and fires the chain gun which fires razor wire at high speed. It converts anyone in its way into hamburger. So that is the messy end of the third mercenary.

Cut to the head merc headphoning Harwood who instructs him to set the bridge on fire. Back in the shop the Man with No Name arrives and hands the gun back to Fontaine. Rydell takes a call from Laney on the Brazilian shades, Laney tells him the bridge is being torched but to leave the thermos / Rei Toei on the bridge. He plugs the thermo device into a power socket and Rei appears, a shimmering beautiful slender woman. She says hello to Rydell but then addresses the Man with No Name and tells him his name is Konrad. And that he still carries a torch for a slender blonde, Lise, who he lost back in the day. Aah. So the cold-hearted killer is a softie after all.

Out of nowhere Tessa arrives trailing drones with cameras, riding on a big three wheeler driven by Elmore, the skinny lighting guy from the club. Chevette and Rydell clamber onto it but can’t persuade Fontaine or the Silent kid to join them. Elmore turns the bike and roar off towards the San Francisco end of the bridge.

But they soon run into crowds fleeing the fire and get knocked off the bike. Tessa disappears, Rydell grabs for Chevette and loses the chain gun down a sewer pipe. Oops. Chevette leads Rydell to the steps up and to the little funicular train Fontaine made up to Skinner’s home-made apartment.

Meanwhile Laney has co-opted his friends in ‘the Walled City’. These are dissident Chinese hackers who were kicked out of the actual walled city when Hong Kong was handed back to China but created a digital alternative for nerds and hackers everywhere. Mustering their support, in cyberspace Laney suddenly finds himself face to face with Harwood. The latter is suave and debonair and insouciant like the baddies in all James Bond movies are. He is not sure what is going to happen and he disappears down into the flow of data.

Meanwhile Rydell and Chevette emerge onto the roof of Skinner’s pad only to be ambushed by the man with the black scarf, leader of the mercenaries. He pistol whips Rydell and then points the gun to kneecap him but Chevette begs him not to and he doesn’t. Instead he steps into the mini-glider he’s had stashed up here all the time. But as he steps over the edge of Skinner’s roof into the night sky, Chevette runs forward and with Skinner’s knife rips a long tear in the fabric, rendering the glider utterly useless and the mercenary plunges straight down, hitting pillars and stanchions like all the master baddy’s henchmen in every James Bond movie and cheap thriller movie ever made.

Chevette runs back to big strong Rydell (‘my man!’) and helps him sit up groggily. Now the smoke from the fire engulfs them and they start choking but at that very moment a helicopter bearing a vast load of ice cold water hoves into view just over them and dumps hundreds of tonnes of water onto the Bridge.

Meanwhile back at Fontaine’s shop, Rei Toei had told Konrad to plug the thermos into the eyephones Silencio uses. He enters cyberspace and Rei is with him. She tells him to follow the watch, the last watch he could see, and Silencio with his advanced obsessive feel for watches and nothing but watches follows it across the cyberverse and is suddenly in a small room in the bowels of a castle where he meets Harwood who is astonished to see him. Then some of the avatars from the Walled City appear and we know they have used Silencio’s skills to track down Harwood to his hiding place.

Meanwhile, back out in the real world, a black kid, Boomzilla, who we met much much earlier when Tessa and Chevette paid him to mind their van, he is in the Lucky Dragon branch nearest the Bridge, watching the crazy action, huge fire, fire engines everywhere, then choppers dropping vast amounts of water, anyway all this mayhem only slightly delays the first ever use of the Nanofax gadget.

Boomzilla watches a little speech being given saying the original Lucky Dragon statuette will be inserted in the Singapore headquarters and then rebuilt in every Lucky Dragon franchise around the world. Except that the light pings and out of the microwave-looking device unfolds a naked Japanese girl, slender and black-haired, smiles at everyone and runs out the front door.

Back on the Bridge it’s dawn. Rydell has spent the night with Chevette in the heavy duty sleeping bag the mercenary had used on Skinner’s roof. Very warm and cosy. He gets up, butt naked, pads to the edge to have a pee. There’s a hovering drone with Tessa’s voice blaring at a sleepy Chevette, that she, Tessa, got loads of footage during the fire, she’s got a contract to make her documentary (TV again).

Eventually the drone buzzes off. Rydell climbs down a layer and is surprised to find Buell Creedmore holed up there. He too climbed up to escape the flames. Well, the venue’s burned down, and Buell whines that his career is over. In what is probably meant to be a comical moment he reveals he ain’t a good ole boy country-and-western dude after all, he grew up in suburban New Jersey. And he starts crying.

Rydell climbs back to the roof and realises he is overwhelmingly in love with Chevette.

Cut to Konrad, the former Man with No Name, catching a cab to TransAmerica, the main mega corporation run by Harwood. Here he presents himself and is strip searched and handcuffed and accompanied to the lift by seven goons, as per Harwood’s instructions. But his weapon is in the belt buckle at front of his trousers. By the time the lift arrives he will have killed all of them. Because like the assassin / ninjas / superheroes of so many Yank movies, he is invulnerable.

Yamazaki has brought Keith Blackwell, the enormous Australian head of security of the pop singer Rez, who featured heavily in the previous novel, to rescue Laney. They go down to the cardboard city in the bowels of Shinjuku railway station and Blackwell razors open Laney’s carton. But he isn’t there.

Fontaine returns from the Red Cross stands at the end of the Bridge. Stuff is still being cleared up but there’s more media vans than emergency services. Silencio has been sweeping up the broken glass outside the shop and doing a good job. You get the sense Fontaine will adopt him. He reminds me of the mute boy sweeping up main street in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 coming-of-age movie, The Last Picture Show. This novel is written in Gibson’s cyberstyle, but it overflows with very traditional, down-home, American sentimentality.

And sure enough, in the final chapter, in the last scene, Silencio starts to talk!. He appears to be in charge of the shop now. And another boy brings in a ruined watch. And in a token of the future, the boy asks Silencio if he can watch the weird device fix his watch. They place the damaged watch onto ‘the bed’ and watch it sink into it as a coin into mud. Within its womb molecules work and within nine minutes the watch will emerge utterly restored good as new. The future is now.

Thoughts

Well, number one, it is a major achievement to think in these terms, to conceive of plots which revolve around dataflows and nodal points within cyberspace. Most people were struggling to adapt to the dial-up versions of the internet in 1999 while Gibson had already perfected a way of creating entrancing fictions out of it.

And Gibson’s highly engineered prose poetry is phenomenal. He has all kinds of tricks up his sleeve to keep it pumping – short phrases, omitting subjects of sentences, slang, streetwise allusions to keep you constantly on your toes. Modern thriller basic tricks.

  • Fontaine looked at Rydell. Pursed his lips. Nodded. (page 234)
  • Hole there the size of a saucer, and getting bigger. (page 261)

Short sentences. Leave out subject. Makes it hipper. Cool style.

But… but… although the book has countless clever angles and is written in a highly stylised, tech savvy, thriller style… key scenes include a fight in a bar and a shootout around a shop where the good guys have been pinned down by the bad guys. It feels like Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) or the familiar rundown seedy future wreckage of a movie like Escape From New York (1981). In other words, at numerous places the actual storyline and events feel hackneyed, clichéd, and filled with the over-familiar tropes of ten thousand American action movies.

Paint it black

And black. Everyone wears black. Of course they do, because it’s cool. Rydell wears a black t-shirt. Chevette is wearing black jeans and a black sweatshirt. The lead mercenary wears a black leather coat and a black scarf. Two other mercs were a black leather jacket and a black armoured vest (page 241). The skinny drug addict who runs the lights at the club where Buell performs and then the fight breaks out, he wears a black meshbacked cap and a black t-shirt (page 246). Everyone wears black because black is cool and fashionable, what people wear in fashion shoots, in edgy ads, in movies like The Matrix. It’s the only colour Lou Reed wore and Gibson is the Lou Reed of science fiction.

World-shattering claims, tiny cast

Gibson’s novels use the rhetoric of world-changing worldshifts. But in the end the stories only involve about fifteen characters (the speaking parts in this one are Durius, Rydell, Buell, Shoat, their girlfriend Maryalice, Tessa, Chevette, Konrad, Fontain, Silencio, Elmore, Laney, Carson, Harwood, lead mercenary).

Not only that, but they are all sane. What I mean is they’re all cut from the same basic thriller cloth, they all think with the same rational clarity, they all act with that thriller directness and logic (with the possible exception of the Man with No Name who is, therefore, the most interesting character). When the fire starts Fontaine briefly alludes to the feral kids growing up on the Bridge but, when you stop and think about it, there is absolutely no reference to the psychological impact of growing up in the Bridge favelas. In fact when you stop and reflect, there is pretty much no psychology in any of these novels. All the characters are capable and competent, good at fighting, handy with guns, behave like cardboard characters from action movies. Nobody panics, goes to pieces or doesn’t know what to do.

Compare and contrast Gibson’s fiction with the stories of J.G. Ballard who specialises in characters who collapse into private psychoses, weird private visions, and whose stories create in the reader a sense of being seriously adrift, trapped in a world completely at odds with the usual one (The Drought, The Drowned World, High Rise, Concrete Island).

There’s never any sense of the genuinely strange in Gibson – with the one shining exception of the way he describes characters like Laney experiencing cyberspace, plugging in and suddenly being amid canyons of gleaming data, the ‘grey fields of light’ (page 254). Now that is new and vivid and wonderful.

But a lot of the rest of the action could come from a standard Jack Reacher novel, with rough, tough manly hero (Rydell) saving his girl (Chevette), forging a brief friendship with the black dude (Fontaine) helped by the mysterious stranger (Konrad) and in which the baddy is, as always, the unscrupulous rich (white) head of some mega-corporation.

Rei Toei may be a cool invention, an entirely digital being, but every time she appears she is, for the first second, butt naked and very beautiful (as Chevette notices with intense jealousy first time she appears to Rydell). Beautiful, naked young Japanese girls. Hardly subverting action movie clichés, is it, or the basic stereotypes of all action narratives, whether in thrillers, movies or graphic novels or comics.

In that respect, far from feeling out there and experimental, most of Gibson’s fiction feels fantastically familiar from any number of Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise action adventure movies. Die Hard With A Laptop.

Also, Rei Toei may be a cool invention, the first entirely digital being and yet…what does she actually do? What does she change or make happen? It feels a lot like Gibson can come up with these great ideas, images, digital symbols but then… really struggles to make them relevant to the real world, to come up with a plot which justifies the hype.

Oh, and the Big Thing, When The World Changed, The Thing Which Was Going To Change Everything which was heavily trailed throughout the novel, designed to keep the reader on the edge of their seat?

As so often in a Gibson novel, it doesn’t, in fact, happen. Nothing changes. The world does not come to an end. Cody Harwood seems to be trying to pull off some scam but we never understand what it is. So now an American convenience store franchise is going to be able to do 3-D printing? Hmmm. Not world shattering is it?

Instead a young, thin, naked Japanese girl steps out of a microwave. Maybe we’re meant to interpret this as the advent of a New Era in Human History because we’ve invented teleporting. But, in fictional terms, it pales into insignificance next to the classic tough guy Rydell holding his babe Chevette round the shoulders as dawn broke over the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge, shucks.

A month or so after reading the book all I really remember about it is the Golden Gate Bridge being set on fire and the shootout at the shop, both of them hard-core 1970s action movie tropes.

Credit

All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson was published by Viking Press in 1999. All references are to the 2000 Penguin paperback edition.

Other William Gibson reviews

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Posted by Simon on April 16, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/04/16/all-tomorrows-parties-william-gibson/

Virtual Light by William Gibson (1993)

Yamazaki crossed to the smooth curve of cable that interrupted the room’s floor. Only an oval segment of it was visible, like some mathematical formula barely breaking a topological surface in a computer representation. He bent to touch it, the visible segment polished by other hands. Each of the thirty-seven cables, containing four hundred and seventy-two wires, had withstood, and withstood now, a force of some million pounds. Yamazaki felt something, some message of vast, obscure moment, shiver up through the relic-smooth dorsal hump. The storm, surely; the bridge itself was capable of considerable mobility; it expanded and contracted with heat and cold; the great steel teeth of the piers were sunk into bedrock beneath the Bay mud, bedrock that had scarcely moved even in the Little Grande. (Virtual Light, page 182)

The Sprawl trilogy and Gibson’s prose

Gibson is a science fiction author but incorporates a good deal of noir, pulp, thriller and other genre tropes as well as, occasionally, rising to genuinely ‘literary’ complexity of psychological affect. I just read Michael Crichton’s debut novel, The Andromeda Strain, and that has a very straightforward plot, a thriller mapped out across five days, written in extremely clear and lucid prose, written so a 9-year-old could understand it. There are occasional demanding passages describing scientific theories around biology, extra-terrestrial life and so on, but these also are written with the clarity of a school textbook. Clarity is the aim.

Gibson by contrast, is noted for the cool, streetwise, technologically savvy and drug-wired prose style which he invented for his so-called Sprawl trilogy – being Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).

All three of those novels concern ‘street’ people, hustlers, living among the shanties and hi-tech canyons of a futuristic society, living lives full of violence and drugs, and in all three these hustlers are slowly introduced to the higher levels of society, to the professional middle classes, then to billionaires, and so take us on a journey of discovery to uncover the real workings of their post-war society (the Sprawl trilogy is set 50 or 60 years in the future, after World War III).

Another feature of all three Sprawl novels is you’re never really sure what is going on – even when I reached the semi-apocalyptic endings of all three novels, I wasn’t completely sure what had just happened. Since I felt the same about his collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, which also rises to a kind of visionary apocalyptic climax, I concluded that this is a consistent element of Gibson’s approach: that key aspects of the narrative are kept mysterious, giving you the feeling of something ungraspable, just out of reach.

This is one way in which his books might be said to be ‘literary’, in a way the utterly obvious and unmysterious Crichton never is. Everything is explained in Crichton; big important things are not explained, in Gibson.

The Bridge trilogy

Virtual Light is the first of what developed into a new set of three novels, the Bridge Trilogy. How are the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies different? Well, the Sprawl stories were set about fifty years in the future, in around 2035 (they were written in the 1980s), after World War III, when everyone has access to advanced digital technology, and hackers make a living ‘jacking into’ cyberspace in order to carry out hit and run raids against the vast data icebergs of the future corporations which run everything.

The Bridge Trilogy is set in the future, but not so far into the future nor in so different a society. To be precise, it is set only ten years or so after the first novel was published – in what was then the ‘future’ of 2006.

There have still been society-changing events: a mega earthquake (which seems to be named Little Grande) has divided California into NoCal and SoCal (first mentioned page 8) resulting in a steady stream of new volcanoes up in Washington state (p.32). The President is a black woman (p.9), the air is toxic from all the polluting vehicles, skin cancer is a problem, everyone wears a lot of suntan cream (p.14) (see a full list of characteristics of the Bridge world, below).

Why is it called the Bridge trilogy? Because a central feature is that San Francisco’s famous Golden Gate Bridge broke during the earthquake, and has been transformed by homeless survivors into a huge, futuristic shantytown. For some of the old-timers who ‘colonised’ it, like Skinner, it’s a place to end their days, but for others like the fresh young heroine of the book, Chevette, it’s all they’ve ever known.

She looked up, just as she whipped between the first of the [concrete] slabs, and the bridge seemed to look down at her, its eyes all torches and neon. She’d seen pictures of what it looked like, before, when they drove cars back and forth on it all day, but she’d never quite believed them. The bridge was what it was, and somehow always had been. Refuge, weirdness, where she slept, home to however many and all their dreams. (p.122)

Given that the trilogy is named after the bridge, it’s notable that the bridge, as such, doesn’t feature that much in the plot, although it is woven in as a key setting, being the temporary home of Chevette and featuring the scene where a bounty hunter comes looking for her there.

The word ‘bridge’ possibly also has a metaphorical sense in that the entire trilogy is a ‘bridge’ from the present (well, the 1990s when Gibson wrote them) to the hyper-digital future envisioned in the Sprawl trilogy of the 2030s and ’40s.

All manner of cool references are slipped into the text about this cool future, which combines a maximum of stoner, drug, derelict street savvy with the highly-armed, gun expertise of Judge Dredd. Thus there is a lot of talk about Glock machine guns, knives, flick-knives, stunguns, SWAT stun grenades and many more weapons. This is meant to be a semi-dystopian future but a) the fact that it is set in what is now our past and b) its obsession with guns, just reinforces my sense of what a screwed-up, hyper-violent society America is, now.

The cool gun expertise alternates with cool references to a new designer drug, ‘dancer’.

Seriously tooled-up intruders tended to be tightened on dancer, and therefore were both inhumanly fast and clinically psychotic. (p.9)

From the get-go Gibson is master of a street savvy, whip-smart, post-Beat prose. Here’s a paragraph from the first page:

The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the lens of night. (page 1)

A lot is going on here, but to pick three obvious points:

  1. It’s poetic prose, designed to be savoured and reread for its sound alone.
  2. ‘The sewage flats’? This is the one and only time they’re mentioned in the book so they take their place alongside hundreds of other details which are thrown away, unexplained, and from which the reader uses their imagination to construct the functioning and appearance of this futureworld (see the list below).
  3. ‘lodged in the lens of night’ is a self-consciously poetic and imaginative image. The book is full of them. It is a self-consciously stylish book, on all levels (in its prose style and setting and characters and plot).

Cops

However, having said all this about Gibson’s zippy prose style and slick future-vision, the reader quite quickly realises the novel is about a cop, Berry Rydell, who’s become a kind of private security guard. An American novel about a cop-turned private detective? Actually this is a very old trope, going back to the noir novels of the 1930s and 40s, to Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler…

And then, as the novel progresses, we watch as this tough private eye rescues the attractive young woman from the bad guys and whisks her off to safety while he tries to figure out the Right Thing To Do.

Hmmm, in this elementary respect, the basic plot structure of Virtual Light seems far from experimental or new – it is, to some extent, a cyberspace update of film noir tropes and characters and plot.

So: we learn that Berry Rydell, born 1983 (p.14) is an ex-cop from Knoxville, Tennessee, who was cashiered out of the service after shooting to pieces a drug-addled maniac who was holding his wife and kids hostage and demanding to speak to the president. He’s managed to get a job with a private security firm named IntenSecure in Los Angeles, alongside a ripe collection of freaks and allergy monkeys… Here’s a plot summary:

Plot summary

Berry Rydell is fired from the Tennessee police force for shooting a hostage-taker, the demented Kenneth Turvey.

Rydell is in his twenties looks like Tommy Lee Jones (p.81) i.e. ruggedly handsome.

The notoriety Rydell wins from shooting Turvey and being sacked leads to him briefly being taken up by the sexy presenter of a TV show, Cops With Problems, Karen Mendelson (p.16) who flies Rydell out to LA and up to her swank penthouse apartment for a few weeks of expense account living and wild sex, before a new and better story comes along, she dumps him and has him escorted from the apartment by security guards who work for IntenSecurity Corporation, a ‘rentacop’ outfit.

That’s what gives Rydell the idea of applying for a job there. He gets one driving a vast 6-wheel ‘Hotspur Hussar’ around the houses of the rich up in Benedict Canyon who’ve paid for security checks (to be precise, he is employed in ‘the residential armed-response branch’ of the IntenSecurity Corporation p.48), alongside a skinny streak of piss named Sublett, who grew up in a trailer park dominated by his born-again Christian mother, watching old movies and harangued all day by TV evangelists.

One evening Rydell and Sublett follow instructions beamed from ‘the Death Star’, the nickname they give to the Southern Californian Geosynclinical Law Enforcement Satellite (p.11).

But it’s a hoax; someone has hacked into the system in order to make Rydell think a robbery and hostage situation is taking place at some luxury home. So Rydell rams the huge truck through the house’s security gate, across the Japanese garden and through the living room wall, and is staggering into the house with his machine gun when… an LAPD helicopter descends over the wreckage and arrests him; the children were off with their father somewhere; there was no hostage situation; the wife was having kinky sex (PVC and handcuffs) with the Polish gardener. As a result she sues IntenSecurity for physical and emotional damages, and they suspend Rydell from all duties: it’s another screw-up.

Cut to San Francisco. Here Chevette-Marie Washington (p.120), who long ago escaped from a juvenile detention centre outside Beaverton (p.125), is a bicycle courier. After making a drop (or ‘pull a tag’ as they seem to call it) at the Hotel Morrisey, she bumps into a drunk in the elevator who takes her up to a party hosted by someone called Cody Harwood, where she spends 15 minutes feeling seriously out of place, gets hit on a by a slimeball with a wet cigar then, on the way out, pushed up against the slimeball by the dense crowd while his attention is distracted talking to a hooker, something is sticking out his pocket and so, on impulse, Chevette nicks it, and is out the apartment door and over to a service elevator, down to the car park, unlocks her bike and is off into the city within minutes…

This turns out to be the core of the plot. Without realising it, Chevette has stolen a very expensive pair of sunglasses. Why? Because they are Virtual Light shades, see below.

Chevette lives high up on the Golden Gate Bridge with a broken-down old man named Skinner in a shack he’s built high up amid the cabling. In the years since the earthquake, thousands of homeless people have constructed a shanty town in the sky, building home-made apartments which have slowly crept up the struts and along the cables of the old bridge till it looks like a giant crustacean, covered with Gothic excrescences.

Skinner is regularly visited by Yamazaki, a Japanese sociologist who is writing a study of how the bridge was colonised and so interviews Skinner because he was one of the ‘pioneers’ of its settlement. T, this being a handy prompt for a series of flashbacks or retellings from Skinner of how it all happened. Yamazaki is not, however, an impressive or powerful figure;  when we see Yamazaki from Chevette’s viewpoint, he is ‘the Japanese nerd… the college boy or social worker’ who always looks lost.

LA Back in Los Angeles, Rydell – having been suspended from work by IntenSecurity – is told by his immediate boss Juanito Hernandez about a job opportunity, working for a freelance security operative, Lucius Warbaby, up in San Francisco. Rydell needs a job so he flies economy up to Frisco sitting next to a sweet old lady who goes on about having to arrange for her husband’s brain, which is in cryogenic storage, to be moved to a better facility. The wacky old future, eh.

Rydell is met at the airport by huge black Lucius Warbaby and his gofer, Freddie (both described on page 80). Freddie’s loud shirt is covered with images of guns, Warbaby has a brace on one leg and walks with a cane. He is the size of a refrigerator but stylish and dignified.

San Francisco Chevette works for Allied Couriers. She’s called in for a grilling by her boss, Bunny Malatesta (p.94) who asks why she checked in to Hotel Morrissey security (on the job where she strayed into the party) but never checked out. The hotel is following it up because the heat is on about the missing shades. In fact, Bunny tells her, the heat is turned up because the owner of the shades has been murdered.

In the next scene Rydell is with Warbaby when he meets two SF homicide cops who are investigating the self-same murder, of Hans Rutger Blix (p.102). The cops are Russians, Svobodov and Orlonsky. Warbaby is a big man but precise and punctilious and polite; he has beautiful handwriting (p.163). He reminds me a bit of the Fat Man in The Maltese Falcon.

Chevette’s courier colleague, a beautiful black man named Samuel Saladin DuPree (p.129), or Sammy Sal, gets her to admit to stealing the shades. She shows them to him and he explains that the shades are Virtual Light sunglasses (p.113). They interact directly with the optical nerve without needing actual light. Sammy explains they’re fairly common among professionals, like a hologram.

In fact Warbaby has a pair which he uses when he takes Freddie and Rydell to the crime scene – the hotel room where Blix was murdered – and further explains that the VL shades have ‘drivers’ in the lenses and frames which affect the optic nerves directly (p.120).

Freddie takes Rydell shopping to ‘Container City’, comprised of loads of derelict cargo ships and their containers with stairways strung up and between them, very trash futuristic, maybe like the final scene in the movie I, Robot.

A character named Loveless, a hired thug, arrives at Skinner’s shack on the Bridge with a gun. Chevette is up on the roof with Sammy. Loveless doesn’t see Sammy but orders Chevette to climb down and back into Skinner’s shack. He handcuffs Skinner and Yamazaki with funky futuristic handcuffs made of flexible plastic which tighten if you struggle against them.

Loveless has come looking for the stolen shades. Chevette lies and tells him they’re in the pannier of her bicycle so he forces her down ladders towards the rigged-up lift which takes them down to road level. Here Chevette cleverly arranges for the bike’s electric defence mechanism to give Loveless an electric.

Sammy has silently followed them both down to street level and now bops Loveless on the head but not hard enough. He just has time to hand Chevette back the shades (he’d been holding them up on the roof when Loveless appeared in Skinner’s apartment) before a dazed Loveless staggers back to his feet and pumps Sammy full of lead – Sammy simply disappearing backwards between the cables off the bridge and falling to his death. Shocked, Chevette just turns and runs.

Meanwhile, Warbaby and Freddie arrive with Rydell at the base of the bridge and send him onto it to find Chevette, they being scared by exaggerated stories of its voodoo, cannibalistic inhabitants.

To ensure drama, a heavy rainstorm comes on and in the thick of it Rydell stumbles across Chevette standing in the rain. He tails her as she staggers along the bridge in the rainstorm and comes across her one-time boyfriend, Lowell, and his ghoulish sidekick Cody, sitting atop a container.

Rydell tails the three as they head off to a bar, humorously named Cognitive Dissidence. Rydell goes into the warm fug of the bar after them, taking a place at the bar and ordering a beer while he ponders what to do next. But into this bar suddenly arrives one of the two Russian homicide cops Warbaby had introduced him to soon after he arrived in SF, coming in huge and silent and with a drawn gun. He orders Chevette to come with him but then…all the lights go out.

In the darkness the fat lady who operates a dancing hologram which is a feature of the bar, makes it dance all round the Russian’s head, giving Rydell long enough to make it across the bar, scoop up Chevette and carry her kicking and screaming to the stairs out of the place. Unfortunately, he runs straight into the other Russian waiting at the top of the stairs who stops them. Rydell and Chevette are both disarmed and handcuffed and forced to trudge under the watchful guns of the Russians to the San Francisco end of the bridge.

Here Warbaby and Freddie, who commissioned the Russian heavies, are waiting for them. They unhandcuff Rydell and are beginning to explain what’s going on when there is another dramatic surprise: one of Chevette’s friends who we’d been very briefly introduced to a bit earlier, a big bear of a man incongruously named Nigel, seeing Chevette taken away at gunpoint, now attacks everyone on a heavyweight bike, ramming the Russian with the gun, grabbing him and banging his head against the hood of Rydell’s car.

As the others set about dealing with this Nigel, Rydell drags Chevette into his Patriot 4 x 4, kick starts it and they skid off, Warbaby raising his cane which turns out to be a concealed gun and shooting out the Patriot’s rear window, but then they’ve turned a corner and are escaping!

Chevette directs Rydell to Haight Street, where they drop the Patriot (which is promptly stolen) and hide out in a tattoo parlour, pretending to take their time in the waiting room deciding on a joint tattoo, while they calm down.

When they eventually leave the tattoo parlour, in a striking coincidence, who should stop and ask the way but the nice old lady Rydell had chatted to on the plane up here, Mrs Danica Elliott, who has hired a big white camper van to drive back to LA in. She asks Rydell if he can drive since she is completely lost. So he and Chevette get in and drive nice and slow out of town. Eventually they’re so tired they hand the driving back to Mrs Elliott and go to sleep in the bed in the back of the camper.

BUT – when they wake up the camper is stationary and Mrs Elliott is gone and who else but Loveless, the hired killer, is waiting for them! I had a sinking feeling that he might have murdered the old lady (one gets sick of all the murder and carnage in American novels) and so was relieved to discover she was herself an IntenSecurity operative put in place to tail and watch Rydell.

Loveless now proceeds to explain The PLOT. The Virtual Light shades Chevette stole contain the blueprint for the comprehensive rebuilding of shattered San Francisco by foreign investors. These are based in Costa Rica (which has been mentioned a number of times as the location for stored data in the same way Switzerland is for huge foreign bank accounts in our day).

The rebuilding project has to be handled carefully because the local Americans might object, but the core issue is that big corporations want to buy up the land the new city is going to be built on. So if the plans get out, all sorts of other actors (for example, the state) might buy it up instead. Thus the precise plans must be kept secret because inconceivably vast fortunes stand to be made or lost.

And it all comes down to possession of the shades. Blix was a courier tasked with delivering them to the right person in San Francisco, but instead let himself be distracted, getting drunk at that party and then stupidly losing them (when Chevette picked his pocket). Loveless had been tasked with shadowing Blix and when the latter lost the shades was only too happy to murder him, not just killing him but slitting his throat and pulling his tongue out to make it look like some South American drug killing.

While Loveless is talking he gets thirsty and orders Chevette to get him a drink from the camper’s fridge, nice and slow. Out of his sight, Chevette slips into Loveless’s drink an entire stash of the designer drug dancer, and hands it to him. Thus, as Loveless carries on explaining The Plot to Rydell and Chevette, he starts to sweat and hallucinate, and ends up firing his pistol manically. Rydell and Chevette throw themselves out the doors, and hide while Loveless runs off shooting wildly. Then they jump back into the camper and make off at speed.

Rydell and Chevette stop to get directions from an old-timer at a derelict Shell gas station. Rydell had used a phone they picked up in their adventures to ring the only person he trusts, Sublett, who we met back at the start of the story – only to discover Sublett has quit his job at IntenSecurity and gone home to his mother’s trailer on a wacky Christian base camp. Looking at the map Rydell realises it’s fairly close by, so Rydell and Chevette drive there and bluff their way in by pretending to be extreme born-again Christians.

There follows extended satire about TV evangelists, in this instance a fictional one named the Reverend Fallon. This actually feels quite old now, very 1980s. No-one cares about TV evangelists any more, compared to the power of the internet, social media, Facebook, the Russians and President Trump.

Rydell devises A Cunning Plan. First he calls Chevette’s ex, Lowell, and puts the frighteners on him to get him to give them access to the digital online place known as ‘the Republic of Desire’. Then he ascertains that one of Sublett’s nerdy friends in the born-again caravan park, Buddy, has a set of eyephones. He pays Buddy to use them, then Chevette watches as Rydell puts them on and dials into early cyberspace.

Rydell has got details of how to dial into the Republic of Desire and here, in cyberspace, sees three weird figures, a woman made of TV shows, a man mountain and a kind of Tyrannosaurus Rex with human hands. These three entities instantly access Rydell’s records and read everything about his life and history, are bored and are leaving the call when Rydell asks them whether any of them lives in San Francisco and likes it the way it is. This gets their attention and Rydell goes on to explain how the plans stored on the Virtual Light sunglasses reveal how San Francisco is going to be handed over to foreign developers and changed out of all recognition. That gets the three digital warriors’ attention.

Together they cook up a plan which dominates the last thirty pages of the novel, which feels like a scam or heist in the style of Ocean’s 11.

Chevette dresses as a courier and enters Century City II, the luxury condo where Rydell had briefly lived with top lawyer Karen Mendelson when they had their brief affair. Soon as Karen Mendelson opens her apartment door, Sublett pushes her and Chevette back into her apartment.

Meanwhile Rydell has recruited the three hackers in the Republic of Desire to help him. The man mountain figure refers to himself as the God-Eater, but they could be anyone, anywhere, Rydell reflects ruefully. Rydell makes his way to Century City II, where he’s arranged to meet Warbaby at 3pm. He watches Warbaby and Freddie and the two Russian hoods (the Bad Guys) arrive in two separate cars, then enter the mall. He follows them up inside, then phones the three hackers in the Republic of Desire again. The narrative explains that they decided to ‘help’ because they don’t want to see San Francisco over-developed and also it presented a new technical challenge, which amuses them.

What happens is: the hackers take control of SF police in order to fly armed drones into the mall which tell Warbaby, Freddie and the Russians to get on their faces. This is because the system has been hacked to identify them of being terrorists planning to blow up the entire mall.

But where’s their hired goon, Loveless? Seeing he hasn’t come along with Warbaby, Rydall guesses he must have gone straight to Karen’s apartment. Rydell dashes up there and arrives just in time, just at the split second Loveless emerges from hiding and raises his little gun to Chevette’s temple planning to take her hostage or just to shoot her. And that’s the moment Rydell hits him with the capsicum spray he carries round with him like mace gas only much worse.

Epilogue

Then – The Payoff. The cops arrest the five baddies, Warbaby, Freddie, the two Russian hoods and Loveless. Then a whole fleet of Karen Mendelson’s lawyer friends arrive, including the legendary lawyer Wellington Ma, and these media operators immediately see the TV potential of the story and so sign up Chevette and Sublett to tell their stories. While Chevette had been in the apartment with Karen she’d shown her how to play the Virtual Shades, so Karen has seen the development scams which were planned and is able to retell it to her lawyers and the cops. Rydell et al are in the clear, and a good TV show will be made about it all, and the baddies will be brought down. Rydell et al will be arrested but the head lawyer from Cops in Trouble tells him they’ll get bail within the hour and then they can start working on the documentary and then the made-for-TV movie.

In other words – despite the futuristic sci-fi trappings – this feels, in the end, like an American crime caper: the goody is a cop with a heart of the gold, the young girl assistant has nice ‘tits’ (as Rydell puts it, more than once) the baddies are crooked property developers, foreigners and blacks – and everything will be sorted out by shit-hot LA TV lawyers.

Ultimately, feels more like an episode of LA Law than genuine science fiction.

Features of Gibson’s futureworld of 2006

  • the President is a woman named Millband (p.17) and is black! (p.183)
  • there’s a vaccination against AIDS (p.18) seems you need certificates of vaccination to show partners before having sex (p.21), the origin of the vaccine is just one individual, J.D. Shapely, who was found to host a benign version of HIV which eradicated the malign version (see below)
  • cops wear air-conditioned helmets with plastic visors
  • ‘gyms’ offer injections of Brazilian fetal matter and having your skeleton ‘reinforced’
  • Italy is no longer a unified state, people come from parts of ‘what used to be Italy’ (p.40) (cf Canada, below)
  • Chevette’s motorbike has a recognition loop you slip your hand into to unlock it (p.44)
  • swimwear is designed to keep off dangerous UV rays and to keep out the dangerous poisons in the sea
  • the ozone hole is a problem (p.46)
  • a virus has destroyed palm trees (maybe all trees) (p.50), later identified as ‘some Mexican virus’ (p.273)
  • five dollar coins, suggesting inflation (p.58)
  • Thomasson is a generic name Gibson’s invented for pointless yet curiously art-like features of the urban landscape (p.61)
  • the big nations of the world (Russia, Canada, Brazil) have fragmented into numerous mini-states (p.71), Canada has broken up into five states (p.242)
  • the Cease Upon The Midnight movement and other self-help euthanasia groups prefer peaceful suicide to having your brain put in a cryogenic store (p.79)
  • it’s been illegal to manufacture cigarettes in the US since 2000 (p.101)
  • the Sword of the Pig movement (p.108)
  • after the earthquake there seem to have been waves of disease or ‘plagues’, which Gibson lists on page 117
  • New Zealand appears to have been occupied by Japanese armed forces who have to suppress resistance movements (p.190)
  • much is made throughout the book of posters and image of AIDS survivor J.D. Shapely dotted around San Francisco and, at one point, Yamazaki channel surfs to a BBC documentary which gives an extremely thorough biography of Shapely (pages 190 to 192). Shapely was a gay prostitute who ended up in prison where they discovered he had AIDS but it didn’t kill him; in him HIV had mutated to a strain which was a) benign b) ate the original virulent strain. Thus a vaccine was made from his version and was administered to everyone in the world.

Funky phrases

So rich in slang and neologisms, American writers.

  • inner trivia banks (p.14)
  • telepresence rig (p.15)
  • Thiobuscaline (3,5-dimethoxy-4-butylthiophenethylamine) – a lesser-known psychedelic drug (p.16)
  • bunny down (p.75)

Conclusion

My opening comments reflected my memories of the Sprawl trilogy and Gibson’s place in science fiction. As I read on into this novel I came to realise it is far less a science fiction book than a techno update of the long lineage of noir cop crime thrillers; that Gibson’s hard-nosed cop with a heart of gold has more in common with Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlow, or Deckard in the movie Blade Runner or John McClane in the Die Hard franchise than with more standard science fiction; i.e. that Rydell is an avatar of a very familiar type, the tall, handsome, strong cop or ex-cop, rough around the edges, prepared to bend the rules, but basically a good guy.

Similarly, although Chevette is a ballsy, street girl, an urchin, a reform school runaway, she, also, has a heart of gold and has to be rescued by Sir Galahad, thus fulfilling a thousand-year old stereotype. And – sigh – she, of course, starts to fall for him.

  • She wondered if maybe she wasn’t starting to fall for Rydell… she had to admit he had a cute butt in those jeans. (p.261)
  • She was starting to really like him… (p.276)

Rydell reminds me most of Lee Child’s creation, Jack Reacher, another knight errant who combines physical prowess with basic moral rectitude (although, admittedly, Reacher didn’t make his debut till 1997, four years after this novel was published).

They all supply the reader with the same basic pleasure, which is they’re rule-breakers and naughty boys who are, at heart, good boys really. No matter how much they bend or break the law, it’s always in a good cause. And they all combine a bunch of characteristics most men wish they had – size and strength and physical prowess, expertise with guns, all kinds of practical know-how with cars and gadgets – and their basic decency wins over even the most initially independent or resistant of women.

To quote a seventy-year-old tagline, ‘Men want to be him; women want to be with him’ (James Bond memes)

In other words, the setting of the Bridge trilogy is novel and creative, and the hundreds of details Gibson works into the novel certainly convey a great fullness and plausibility to his fictional world. But the basic narrative structure is very, very old.

Nothing dates as fast as the future

One last thought: setting the novel closer to the present day, paradoxically makes it more dated. In the far future (well, the 2030s when Neuromancer is set) anything goes. But if you set something in the near future, you have to be more measured and realistic with your predictions and chances increase that whatever you predict will be wrong.

Thus some of the baddies in the book, like Warbaby, get their information via faxes; computers are used a bit but nowhere near as much as they turned out to; there are one or two remote phones but not many – in other words Gibson did not accurately predict the full impact of the great transformative agents of our time, the internet, increasingly lightweight personal computers, and mobile phones.

And his cultural references feel dated, as well. As in the Sprawl novels, many things have a strong Japanese flavour i.e. the inclusion of the Japanese character Yamazaki and repeated references to a catastrophic earthquake that’s taken place in Tokyo. But in the years since 1993, Japan has slipped out of the cool cultural and economic position Gibson gives it:

Japan’s economy has struggled with deflation since its bubble economy peaked in 1989. (Investopedia)

Japan has, since the turn of the century, in terms of culture and economy and products and even art, increasingly been replaced by China.

Also Gibson’s pop culture references have aged. The entire concept of rock music, which is referenced throughout the novel, seems old now. The character Sublett has an obsession with the movies of David Cronenberg, which might have marked him off as at the cutting edge of pop avant-garde in 1993, but not now, in 2020.

Credit

Virtual Light by William Gibson was published by Viking Press in 1993. All references are to the 1994 Penguin paperback edition.

Other William Gibson reviews

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by Simon on April 12, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 12, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/virtual-light-william-gibson/

Elements of a Jack Reacher novel

Reading even a handful of Jack Reacher novels, you can’t help noticing the repeated threads, or tropes, or plot devices, or elements which recur over and again. These thoughts arise from reading The Hard Way but are true of all the others I’ve read.

Violence

Each Jack Reacher novel contains what you could call workaday American, cop thriller violence – fighting, shootouts and so on.

But each one also contains an element which pushes it to the next level of psychopathic cruelty. Hannibal Lector with his advanced and cynical sadism, made his debut appearance in 1986, instantly raising the stakes for any thriller writer who wanted to make an impact. Maybe pulp fiction has always been needlessly cruel, but it’s certainly a key element in the Reacher mix.

In The Hard Way there are two sadistic element:

  1. Hobart’s account of being held for five years in an African prison and, after the initial beatings and tortures, being selected once a year, on his birthday, to have one of his hands or feet amputated by machete and then the stump dipped in bubbling hot tar.
  2. Lane’s threats to his wives. We learn that he had threatened the second wife, Kate, that if she ever tried to leave him, he would break her daughter’s Jade’s hymen… with a potato peeler. The idea is to put him beyond the pale, to establish him as not just a bad man, but a monster. It also has the effect of making the reader feel physically sick.

Reacher’s revenge

I’ve read interviews where Child makes it quite clear that Reacher’s motivation in every book is always revenge. This means that the author always has to construct a plot in which someone reasonably innocent has been wronged, damaged or killed.

That’s the trigger Reacher needs to go into obsessive Search and Destroy mode i.e. the mode which most entertains the hunter-killer reader in all of us.

In the first book in the series, Killing Floor, Reacher’s brother is brutally killed by the counterfeiting ring he is investigating. That’s all it takes. From that point Reacher is on a mission to identify and kill them all, and the fact that one of them turns out to be psychopathically cruel, only bolsters the primitive righteousness of Reacher’s cause.

In The Hard Way, the tenth novel in the series, the Person To Be Avenged feels a little more forced. The ostensible hostages are Lane’s second wife and child, Kate and Jade Allen. When the kidnappers fail to return them after receiving payment, everyone assumes they’re dead and Reacher makes a point of telling several people on his team, several times, that he’s doing all this for them.

‘Kate and Jade are probably already dead.’
‘Then I’ll make someone pay.’ (p.169)

‘They’re dead. You said so yourself.’
‘Then they need a story. An explanation. The who, the where, the why. Everyone ought to know what happened to them. They shouldn’t be allowed to just go, quietly. Someone needs to stand up for them.’
‘And that’s you?’
‘I play the hand I’m dealt. No use whining about it.’
‘And?’
‘And they need to be avenged.’ (p.211)

Two hundred pages later, Lane’s second wife spells out the morality, or the psychological logic of the plots, even more clearly. We have, by this stage of the book, had ample evidence that her husband, Edward Lane, is a twisted sadist. So:

‘He deserves whatever he gets, Mr Reacher. He’s truly a monster.’ (p.439)

That is the sentiment which gives completely free rein to Reacher to use whatever force and violence is necessary, to abandon all scruples, the excuse that justifies the fiercest, Old Testament, unflinchingly brutal vengeance. It is the sentiment ‘he deserves what he gets’ – which provides the underpinning to all the books in the series.

The bad guys are not just crooks pulling a caper, ho ho, like in Ocean’s 11. They always include psychopaths and sadists whose extreme cruelty, in return, justifies Reacher’s use of unforgiving, maximum force.

Expertise

Weapons Reacher is master of all forms of combat and weaponry.

Strategy But also capable in all elements of strategic and tactical awareness. In The Hard Way he is working alongside – and then against – some very well-trained mercenaries, and we are continually reminded of their army training in terms of both strategy and combat.

Handbooks This rises to a climax in the final bloody shootout of the book, where a wealth of army training is invoked by Reacher and his antagonists. At moments like this Reacher novels become almost army textbooks in unarmed and/or armed combat. You wonder how closely Child refers to such handbooks.

That said, sometimes Reacher’s tough guy behaviour comes perilously close to clichés from a collection titled How To Be a Hard Man.

He never sat any other way than with his back to a wall. (p.179)

A to Z Reacher’s knowledge of the street layout, and traffic patterns, of Downtown and Mid-Town Manhattan is demonstrated in dazzling detail. You can’t help feeling that Child himself must have walked every inch of the routes which Reacher follows, and that all the buildings, shops and street furniture would be exactly as he describes.

The chocolatier The building where Lane is told by the kidnapper to drop off the keys to the cars which contain the bags of ransom money, is next to a chocolatier. Reacher and Pauling go through this shop and out into the back where the chocolate is made and moulded, on several occasions. The shop, and all the chocolate-making equipment out back, is described in minute detail. I’d be surprised if it doesn’t exist.

Knowing the time In this book more than the others I’ve read, it becomes a leitmotif that Reacher always knows the time without consulting a clock or watch. It becomes a running joke between him and this book’s Reacher Girl, Pauling.

‘I always know what time it is.’ (p.42)

Of course he does. Repeatedly, Reacher is shown the precise time better than mere watches or clocks, which generally turn out to be fast or slow or broken. Reacher is never broken.

Cars and guns

If you’re a real man you know guns and cars inside out. The car the ransom money is dropped off in is not just a Mercedes Benz. It is a:

‘Silver, four-door sedan, an S-420, New York vanity plates starting OSC, a lot of city miles on it. Dirty paint, scuffed tyres, dinged rims, dents and scrapes on both bumpers.’ (p.15)

And the guns? Don’t get Reacher started on guns.

After they finished their tea Jackson took Reacher into a small mudroom off the back of the kitchen and opened a double-door wall cupboard above a washing machine. In it were racked four Heckler & Koch G36 automatic rifles. The G36 was a very modern design that had shown up in service just before Reacher’s military career had ended…. It had a nineteen-inch barrel and an open folding stock and was basically fairly conventional apart from a huge superstructure that carried a bulky optical sight integrated into an oversized carrying handle. It was chambered for the standard 5.56mm NATO round and like most German weapons it looked very expensive and beautifully engineered.’ (p.440)

In the final firefight, more guns, knives, explosives and night vision goggles are used. Lots of kit, and all of it described in loving detail, and with the knowledge and insight of a true aficionado.

Expert vocabulary

A bit more subtly I was struck by the way Child – in the manner of American thriller writers – always knows the correct terminology for everything. He and his character never say ‘the thingummy, the wotsit’ like most of us. He always knows the correct word.

  • charging cradle – for a mobile phone
  • crosswalk – American term for pedestrian crossing
  • frost heave – uplift on a road surface caused by expansion of groundwater on freezing

Especially in kidnap situations:

  • demand call – from the kidnappers, specifying the amount
  • destination figure – final demand in a ransom
  • instruction call – from the kidnappers, specifying payment details

Reacher knows the name for everything because his author does. Child and his books impress with their confident familiarity with technical terms, military practice, arms and cars, and all aspects of common American phraseology.

  • squawk box – loudspeaker part of an intercom box, especially of a front door buzzer

Humour

I don’t think Reacher says anything funny in books 1 and 3 but numbers 9 and 10 are noticeable for a couple of bits of snappy repartee.

‘You got a name?’
‘Most people do.’ (p.18)

‘Tell me about your career,’ Lane said.
‘It’s been over a long time. That’s its main feature.’ (p.25)

On the move

Do you know the French comic strip Lucky Luke books? Set in the 1870s West, cowboy Luke rambles from town to town with his loyal horse, Jolly Jumper, in each book getting tangled up in a new adventure, defeating the bad guys, tipping his hat to the lady, and moving on.

Each book ends with a picture of Luke riding off into the sunset singing his theme song, ‘I’m a poor lonesome cowboy and a long way from home.’

It’s one of the central American myths, the mysterious, super-capable stranger who rides into town, gets tangled in other people’s troubles, helps out women and children, shoots the bad guys (after enough provocation to be ‘morally’ justified in doing so), then disappears as mysteriously as he came.

It goes back at least as far as James Fenimore Cooper’s novels about the tough capable frontiersman, Natty Bumppo, also known as Leatherstocking, The Pathfinder, Deerslayer, Long Rifle and Hawkeye, and stretches through to the man with no name in numerous Clint Eastwood movies.

Got nothing against women
But I wave them all goodbye…
My horse and me keep riding
We don’t like being tied.

This hoary trope is central to the Reacher stories. Almost every one commences with our hero stepping off a train, bus or plane into a new town, then getting drawn into a 500-page action adventure, then, when the last shot has finished echoing around the corral, tipping his hat to the ladies (particularly the one he has seduced and slept with during the course of the adventure) and ridin’ on out.

Child continually reminds us of this aspect of Reacher’s character, thus plugging him into a deep psychological and cultural archetype.

Reacher always arranged the smallest details in his life so he could move on at a split second’s notice. It was an obsessive habit. He owned nothing and carried nothing. Physically he was a big man, but he cast a small shadow and left very little in his wake. (p.12)

He cast a small shadow. Gee.

The Reacher Girl

Like a Bond girl, there’s a Reacher Girl in every novel. In The Hard Way it’s Private Investigator Lauren Pauling, ex-Special Agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She was on the original FBI investigation of the kidnapping of Lane’s first wife and has felt oppressed by guilt for five years that she and her colleagues screwed up the investigation and allowed the first wife to be killed.

Once he’s been introduced to her, Reacher and Pauling spend a lot of time together pounding the streets of New York, finding Hobart and his sister, then sharing the stressful moment when Lane and his goons show up at the apartment and Pauling, Hobart and his sister hide in the bathroom while Reacher faces the others down and tries to throw them off the scent.

They spend a long night working through theories, Pauling using her contacts at the Pentagon to follow up leads. They become a very tight team. And then they go to bed. Inevitable. From the start she had that look.

Pauling had changed. She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. She looked good. (p.284)

He stopped talking and watched her, silent. She looked great in the candlelight. Liquid eyes, soft skin… He could smell her fragrance. Subtle perfume, soap, clear skin, clean cotton. The shoulder-seams on her T-shirt stood up a little and made enticing shadowy tunnels. She was slim and toned, except where she shouldn’t be… (p306)

Pauling came out of the bedroom looking spectacular. Shoes, stockings, tight skirt, silk blouse, all in black. Brushed hair, light make-up. Great eyes, open, frank, intelligent. (p.320)

The ‘inevitably will get shagged’ look which is universal in Hollywood movies and thrillers like this. In the era of Me Too and militant feminism I find it a bit mind-boggling that so many books and movies still include the slender, busty, nubile young woman whose main purpose – alongside useful detective work and a bit of expert knowledge – is to get her clothes ripped off and be penetrated by the male hero.

In this respect, as in the wandering avenger trope, the stories feel as old as the hills.

The title

‘I’m going to have to do it the hard way,’ Reacher said.
‘What way is that?’
‘It’s what we call it in the service when we didn’t catch a break. When we actually had to work for a living. You know, start over at square one, re-examine everything, sweat the details, work the clues.’ (p.169)

‘What exactly is going on?’
‘We’re sweating the details and we’re working the clues. That’s what’s going on here. We’re doing it the hard way. One step at a time…’ (p.322)

So the title refers to Reacher’s modus operandi, which is the thorough, systematic application of logic and experience to work out complicated problems and situations.

At the same time, it also refers to the inevitable bursts of violence, particularly towards the end of each story.

There are always points where the sidekick says, ‘Shouldn’t we call the police or the FBI or someone?’ to which Reacher always replies, in effect, ‘No, they’d let the bad guys get away – the investigation would be long and drawn out – we know they’re psychopaths so we’re going to kill them. We’re going to do this my way. The hard way.’

Quite simply, forget the forces of law and order. You are in the presence of the masked avenger, the embodiment of vigilante law.

Epilogue

Unlike the other four Reacher books I’ve read, The Hard Way has an epilogue. A page and a half shows us how all the characters we’ve met are faring a year later, and it reads like a fairy tale.

The surviving bad guys get killed in Iraq. Patti, who had carried the cause of her murdered sister for so long, now has a good job and a boyfriend (after all, a woman isn’t complete without a man, right?).

Investigator Pauling is thriving. The severely crippled Hobart and his sister are benefiting from the money Reacher ended up getting from Lane, and handed straight on to them, to get him proper hospital treatment and decent prosthetic limbs.

The good guys are thriving. The bad guys got their just desserts. God is in his heaven.

And Reacher? Like the poor, lonesome cowboy, Reacher has disappeared into the sunset.

Until the next time…

Related links

Reviews of other Jack Reacher novels

1 Comment
by Simon on August 9, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Crime, Literary criticism, Novel, Thriller
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Posted by Simon on August 9, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/08/09/elements-of-a-jack-reacher-novel/

The Hard Way by Lee Child (2006)

‘Very tall, heavily built, like a real brawler. He’s in his late thirties or early forties. Short fair hair, blue eyes.’ (Patti Joseph’s description of Reacher, p.91)

You remember the way episodes of Friends were titled ‘The one with…’ and then specified the core element of that week’s show. You can do the same with the 22 Jack Reacher novels. This is the one where Jack is hired to solve a kidnapping, which turns out to be much more complicated than it seems, and takes him from the streets of New York to a farm in Norfolk.

The café He is sitting in a café in New York when he sees a guy cross the street, get into a Merc and drive off. Nothing special in that. Next morning he’s at the same café when he’s approached by a tough-looking man and persuaded to come with him to meet his boss, Mr Lane. Turns out Mr Lane’s wife has been kidnapped, the kidnappers demanded a million in cash to be left in a car at that location. Lane agreed, had one of his people fill a bag with a million, put it in the boot of the car and drive it to the arranged drop zone. This was the car which Reacher had watched the kidnapper cross the street, get into and drive away. Without knowing it or intending to be, Reacher is a key witness.

The mercenaries Reacher tells them what he knows. ‘Them’? Yes, Lane runs a group of mercenaries (‘a private military corporation’, p.450) tough ex-Army, ex-Marines, U.S. Navy SEALs, British SAS etc. In fact, Reacher analyses their plight so logically and compellingly that Lane hires him on the spot to be a consultant to help manage the situation.

But there is, of course, more to the situation than meets the eye. It takes about 450 pages for Reacher to nail the real story, pages during which he, as usual:

  • acquires a small circle of helpers and supporters
  • who just happen to have privileged access to FBI/Army/Homeland Security sources
  • and manages to wangle financial backing to pay for the endless taxis and trains and planes he needs to take

Not the first time Firstly, it turns out this is the second time a Lane wife has been kidnapped. His first wife, Anne, was kidnapped five years earlier and, although Lane paid the ransom, was found shot dead in New Jersey.

The Dakota Building Reacher quickly discovers that some people suspect the first kidnap was a front, a put-up job. Lane’s base is the famous Dakota Building, next to Central Park, where John Lennon lived and outside which he was shot (Yoko Ono and her bodyguards make a small appearance in the book, walking past Reacher in the lobby).

Patti Joseph Outside the building he is approached by the first wife’s sister, Patti. She is convinced the first kidnap was a sham, and that Lane had her sister murdered. As the book progresses Reacher uncovers the evidence to prove this is true. He discovers that Lane had instructed a member of his inner circle, Knight, who usually drove his wife around, to return to base and tell everyone he’d dropped her off shopping as usual – but in fact to take her out to New Jersey and shoot her. Then paid someone to fake the ransom calls.

Lane had his first wife murdered Why? The first Mrs Lane had come to realise that Lane was a psychopath, and had told him she wanted to leave him. Which hurt his ego so much he had her eliminated. Although Knight – who knew all this – was loyal to his boss, on the mercenaries’ next job – to defend the government of Burkina Faso in Africa, from rebels – Lane contrived a situation whereby he ordered Knight and his best friend among the mercenaries, Hobart, to hold a forward post against the advancing army. Lane then ordered his main force to retreat, abandoning Knight and Hobart to the African rebel soldiers. The aim was to ensure that Knight was killed and along with him the evidence of his wife’s murder. Hobart was just collateral damage.

Detective Brewer The first wife’s sister, Patti Joseph, tells Reacher all this. She has been keeping a close watch on the Dakota Building for years, photographing who goes in and out, keeping a log of the movements of all of Lane’s central circle of mercs, for years. Is that obsessive or is she onto something? She phones in her results to a NYPD detective named Brewer. When Reacher meets Brewer the latter admits that he humours Patti, partly because something might come of her efforts, mostly because she’s a pretty chick.

FBI agent Pauling Turns out that Brewer passes on Patti’s observations to a third party, Lauren Pauling, an ex-FBI agent who was part of the original FBI investigation of the kidnapping of Lane’s first wife and has felt oppressed by guilt for five years that her and her colleagues screwed up the investigation and allowed the first wife to be killed. She is still interested in the case because she hopes evidence will surface to prove that it was Lane who killed the first wife, and not the kidnappers who did it, because that would get the FBI and the cops off the hook for bungling the case.

So who is carrying out the current kidnapping, five years later, of the second Mrs Lane, Kate Lane, a tall, slender, blonde, beautiful model, and her daughter by a previous marriage, Jade (also ‘a truly beautiful child’, p.424)?

Pauling becomes Reacher’s sidekick Reacher develops a close working relationship with Pauling, now a freelance investigator. She has a useful contact in the Homeland Security administration (they always do). Pauling becomes the person Reacher bounces his theories and ideas off, and who accompanies him on his investigations around New York.

Investigations They investigate the house where the kidnapper insisted the keys to each of the cars containing ransom money be dropped through the letterbox. It turns out to be empty. After clever detective work the pair track down the apartment the kidnapper used to oversee the dropping off place for the ransoms. They then manage to locate the apartment where Kate and Jade were kept hostage – though it’s now empty.

The man who doesn’t speak For a long middle stretch of the book, based on eye-witness accounts of neighbours and people who sold the kidnapper bits of furniture, they establish his appearance (non-descript white male) but the standout fact is that he never talks. From several hints they develop the theory that the kidnapper can’t talk and from descriptions of what’s happened to other white mercenaries captures in Africa, they speculate this may be because his tongue was cut out by the rebels.

Africa They think the kidnapper was one of the two men Lane abandoned in Burkina Faso – Hobart or Knight. Using Pauling’s contacts in Homeland Security to identify people who’ve flown back from Africa recently, and then another contact with access to all kinds of security databases, they track down the apartment of Hobart’s sister, which turns out to be conveniently close to the café and to the ransom-money-dropping-off point in Downtown Manhattan.

There’s a very tense moment when they break into the shabby apartment building where Hobart’s sister lives, and climb the squeaking stairs, at pains to be silent in case the kidnapper they’re seeking hears them, and has time to harm or shoot his hostages, Kate and Jade.

Hobart So the reader is surprised and shocked when they kick open the apartment door and find …. a washed-out shabby woman, Hobart’s sister, making soup, and that Hobart himself is a limbless cripple propped up on the sofa.

It is Hobart, he was a member of Lane’s mercenary gang, he was abandoned by Lane, he was captured by the rebel African soldiers. He was held captive for five long years during which he barely survived the starvation and disease and, once a year, they brought him and other prisoners out of their cells into an arena of baying warriors, and asked whether they wanted their left hand, right hand, left foot, or right foot to be hacked off with a machete – and whether they then wanted the stump seared in boiling tar, or left to bleed out.

Which explains why Hobart is in his pitiful state, without feet or hands, a wretched withered stump of a man. Hobart is clearly not the kidnapper, or the man who rented the apartments or who Reacher saw drive away the ransom car right at the start.

But he does confirm that his fellow merc and prisoner, Knight, did carry out the execution of Lane’s first wife, under Lane’s instructions, then helped the fiction that it was a kidnap. So that part of Patti’s story is correct.

Reacher and Pauling have sex Later that night, Pauling expresses to Reacher what a vast relief it is to her, to have confirmed that it was not her professional screw-up which had led to the first wife’s death. The wife was dead before the FBI was even contacted. To celebrate, she and Reacher have his usual athletic, fighting-with-a-bear, championship sex.

She is now his lover, as well as his close associate in the investigation.

The Taylor theory The book sprinkles more dead ends and deliberate false trails for Reacher (and the reader) to work through -, but the main focus of their investigation now shifts to Taylor. This man was in Lane’s inner circle of mercenaries, and was the guy who drove Kate Lane to Bloomingdale’s on the day of the kidnapping. The assumption had been that he was killed almost immediately by someone who got into the stationary car and pointed a gun at the women, forced Taylor to drive wherever they wanted him to go and then killed him.

Child has planted this false version of events in our minds by having Reacher ask not one but two of Lane’s mercs to speculate how they think the kidnapping went down, and both think it happened like that. This version of events had also been confirmed when Pauling’s cop contact, Brewer, told her that the body of a white man had been found floating off a dock in mid-town Manhattan.

Now Pauling and Reacher revisit this story and the first thing they establish is that the ‘floater’ is not Taylor. Wrong height to begin with. Taylor is still alive.

So now Pauling and Reacher develop the theory that Kate and Jade were kidnapped by a disgruntled member of Lane’s inner circle, Taylor, the very driver entrusted with their safety. He pulled out a gun, told her and Jade to shut up, drove them to a safe house, tied them up, made the ransom phone calls and picked up the money. Taylor will have needed an associate, so Reacher and Pauling spend a lot of time thinking through who that could be.

Reacher and Lane In case I haven’t made it clear, all this time – throughout this entire process – Reacher is still nominally under contract to Lane to find the kidnappers. At that first meeting in the Dakota Building, Lane offered Reacher a payment of $25,000 to find Kate and the kidnapper. Reacher is free to go off and roam the city, make his own investigations, contact whoever he likes – but periodically he has to go back to Lane’s apartment, filled with half a dozen surly mercs, and update the boss on progress.

Thus Reacher is sitting with the others when the ransom demand phone calls come through to Len’s apartment. He sits with the others when the second call comes through asking for confirmation that Lane has the cash, and then giving details of the pickup. And then he sits in suspense with the others waiting for a confirmation call that the money has been received, and – hopefully – that Kate is going to be released.

The character of Lane and the mercs Since the kidnapper ends up calling for three separate payments, there are three of these very tense scenes. They also gives Reacher plenty of time to get to know Lane, to witness his psychotic rages, and to see the hold he has over the other mercs. These are strong, well-trained men but each of them, in fact, was a failure in the military, in various ways in need of being led, and prepared to do anything for The Boss.

When there is no call-back after the third and final payment is made, Reacher along with the others begins to fear the worst. That the kidnapper has killed the girls and fled. Child reiterates this idea again and again, having Reacher emphasise that, in his experience, the majority of kidnappings end in the murder of the victims, and that the first 24 hours are key. Every hour after that increases the likelihood of failure.

A bounty on Taylor As the truth sinks in that the girls are probably dead, Lane increases the bounty he will pay Reacher to $1 million. Since he has kept Lane informed of his investigations up to the dismissal of Knight and Hobart as suspects, Lane, Reacher, Pauling and the reader all now think the kidnapping was carried out by Taylor the driver, who faked his own death, held the women hostage in Downtown Manhattan, collected the money three times, killed them, and has now absconded.

Reacher now clicks into Revenge Mode. He knows Lane is a louse, a psychopath who probably had his first wife murdered and abandoned his men to terrible fates in Africa. So he’s not doing it for Lane. He vows to track down Taylor for the sake of the women, for Kate and Jade. In the apartment they have now identified as Taylor’s, which they found empty and abandoned, Reacher noticed one of the speed dial phone numbers was to a number in Britain. He guesses it’s of a close relative.

The novel moves to England

All this has taken about 350 pages. For the last 150 pages of the novel the setting switches to England, for 20 or so pages to London, but then on to rural Norfolk, where Pauling and Reacher track Taylor down to his sister’s farm.

We know that Child – real name James Grant – is himself English. We know that he lives in New York, so we can guess that the extremely detailed descriptions of Reacher and Pauling’s investigative walks around Downtown Manhattan reflect Child’s own detailed knowledge of the area.

It adds a different, not exactly literary but psychological element – maybe a hint of tongue-in-cheek – to the English section of the book, to know that Child is himself English, but pretending to write as an American. So every description in this section is written by an Englishman masquerading as an American writing about a fictional American trying to pretend to fit in with the local Brits.

Thus Child’s description of Reacher walking into a rural pub in Norfolk is layered with ironies, as the Englishman Child imagines what it would be like for an American like Reacher to walk into a pub, and then to try and remember his own (Reacher’s own) days in the U.S. Army when he was stationed in England. All this results in Reacher ordering ‘a pint of best’ while his New York colleague and lover, Pauling, is made to point out all the quaint quirks and oddities of English life.

(The two most notable of these are that a) all the streets are absolutely festooned with signs and painted symbols giving instructions about every element of your driving, ‘the nanny state in action’ and b) London is a vast octopus extending its tendrils into the country for miles and miles, making it impossible to get into or out of at any speed. Both true enough.)

Reacher has been promised $1 million if he can deliver Taylor to Lane. Through British police contacts Reacher and Pauling track down Taylor, confirming he took a flight from New York JFK, arrived at Heathrow and then – using a different line of investigation – establish the whereabouts of his sister.

How? Using the speed dial phone number Reacher had noticed in Taylor’s New York apartment. This locates Taylor’s sister to a farm in Norfolk. Reacher and Pauling hire a car and drive there, locate the village, and the farm, and park in the early morning with binoculars, waiting for Taylor, his sister, her husband and little girl to exit the farmhouse, which they conveniently do a few hours later.

Reacher had already alerted Lane that he has confirmed that Taylor is in England, and so Lane and his crew are en route on a transatlantic flight. Sighting and identity confirmed, Reacher and Pauling drive back to London to meet Lane and his goons in the Park Lane hotel.

Lane doesn’t just want to kill Taylor. He explains how he is going to torture him slowly to death. Reacher is revolted by the psychopath, as ever. A few seats away in the lobby of the hotel, a mother is trying to quiet down her restless squabbling kids. One of them throws an old doll at her brother, which misses and skids across the floor, hitting Reacher’s foot. He looks down at it and has a blinding revelation.

The twist

In a flash Reacher realises what has been wrong with the investigation all along. In a blinding moment he realises he has made a seismic error of judgement and that his entire understanding of the case is not only wrong, but catastrophically wrong.

Why? What vital clues have he and Pauling (and the reader) missed in the last 400 pages? What can it be which totally transforms the situation? Why does he excuse himself from Lane for a moment, walk as if to the toilets, but instead hurtle down into the underground car park, call Pauling to meet him, jump into the hire car, and then drive like a maniac all the way back to Norfolk?

What is the real secret behind the kidnapping of Kate and Jade Lane?

That would be telling. It’s an expertly constructed book with many twists and false trails, tense moments, and sudden surprises. I read it in a day. Take it on your next long train or plane trip or to read by a pool. It is gripping, intelligent and – in much of its factual research (about mercenaries, about the coup in Africa) informative.

Credit

All quotes from the 2011 paperback edition of The Hard Way by Lee Child, first published in 2006 by Bantam Press.

Reviews of other Jack Reacher novels

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by Simon on August 8, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 8, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/08/08/the-hard-way-lee-child/

One Shot by Lee Child (2005)

‘True randomness is impossible for a human to achieve. There are always patterns.’ (p.382)

The plot

James Barr, a soldier Reacher knew from back his army days, is conclusively proven to have parked in a multi-story car park in an unnamed city in Indiana, waited for rush hour workers to leave their offices at 5pm, and then calmly executed five of them using a long-range sniper rifle, packed up and driven home, where he is tracked down and arrested by the police a few hours later.

Call Reacher He refuses to say anything to the investigators except, ‘You’ve got the wrong guy’ and ‘Get Jack Reacher’. In fact, Reacher has already seen the story of the massacre on TV news in a bar and, as soon as he hears the culprit’s name, catches a sequence of buses to the (unnamed) city in Indiana (buses because Jack has no ID, therefore can’t hire cars).

Dramatis personae Here he encounters the cluster of characters surrounding the killer:

  • Barr’s sister, Rosemary, who is convinced her brother is innocent
  • Barr’s lawyer, Helen Rodin, who happens to be the daughter of the city’s district attorney, who will be defending Barr
  • the cop who led the successful investigation, Emerson
  • the city’s District Attorney, Alex Rodin, descendant of Russian immigrants (p.36), who only likes to prosecute cases which are 100% slam dunks
  • Bellantonio, the thin, tall, dry forensic scientist who’s assembled a battery of irrefutable evidence
  • Ann Yanni, the ambitious local NBC news reporter, who Reacher takes an instant dislike to but who he recruits to the cause with the promise of a scoop
  • as it happens, Rosemary Barr, the killer’s sister, works for a law firm and they take pity on her for being associated with her mass murder brother and so commission their regular investigator, Franklin, to look into the case. Later, he is hired by Ann Yanni, who has a much bigger budget, and turns up some useful leads.

There are several strands to the plot.

Kuwait Helen and Rosemary hope Reacher has come to somehow vindicate and save Barr. But it’s the opposite. Reacher was the military policeman who assembled the conclusive evidence that Barr, after years of training as an Army sniper in the late 1980s, and after being forced to sit out Operation Desert Storm in Iraq in 1991 (because it was mostly an armoured and artillery war) snaps, holed up in a car park in Kuwait City, and shot dead four civilians emerging from a house.

The Kuwait coverup The four victims turn out to be American soldiers so you’d have thought Barr would be court martialled and banged away for life. But the investigation uncovered that the four had themselves been gruesome thugs, raping and looting their way across Kuwait City. Any trial of Barr would have inevitably brought this to light with terrible consequences for the reputation of the U.S. Army and the Allied Coalition. Therefore, to Reacher’s intense disgust, the case was suppressed and Barr was given an honourable discharge from the army.

He called for Reacher because a) he had made Reacher a promise to go straight but b), it slowly dawns on Reacher that it was a subtle call for help. Because Barr had seen, at first hand, during the Kuwait investigation, what a meticulous investigator Reacher had been and hopes that, once again, he will be able to use his forensic skills and meticulous logical approach to revealing the real killers…

The Russians The reader is ahead of Reacher because Child, from quite early on, alternates the Reacher sections of narrative, with the parallel thoughts and activities of a group of Russian criminals.

These guys are really hard. Their leader, the Zec, is eighty years old, has lost most of the fingers on both hands, and has lived through extraordinary suffering which is only fleetingly referred to – surviving appalling suffering in the gulag, and through the Second World War. ‘Zec’ is, in fact, Russian slang which simply means gulag prisoner (p.383). We are told that the Zec chewed some of his own fingers off rather than succumb to frostbite and then gangrene in the camp. All his ‘men’ are terrified of him.

His number two is Grigor Linski who, among other experiences he suffered in a similar Russian background, at one point had every one of his vertebrae systematically smashed with a hammer, surviving, but with a telltale limp and stoop (p.219).

The Zec and Grigor have some younger muscle to help, Chenko and the big goon Vladimir. When a sidekick, Raskin, screws up tailing Reacher, he is ordered by the Zec to commit suicide, digs his own grave and shoots himself in the mouth. That’s the kind of terrifying grip the Zec exerts.

The sports bar brawl It slowly becomes clear that these are the guys who somehow got Barr to commit the shooting spree. Reacher speculates that they threatened to hurt or kill Barr’s sister, the only person in the sad loner’s life. 250 pages in we still don’t know for sure whether this is the case or why they sponsored such a high level incident. Instead, we read through an atmosphere heavy with brooding threat. This is given physical form when the Russians commission a pack of redneck toughs to beat Reacher up in a sports bar. Bad idea. Reacher applies his Nine Rules of Barroom Fighting and pulps the first three, whereupon the last two run away.

Sandy More sickeningly, they’d used a local dolly bird named Sandy (real name, Alexandra Dupree) to chat Reacher up in the bar, then leap up and scream that he’d called her a ‘whore’. That was the prompt for the men to come over and ‘protect her honour’. The bar-room fight tactic fails, but the Russians need to stop Reacher snooping around, so a few days later they pick up the girl and kill her outside Reacher’s hotel, hoping to make it look like he eventually slept with her, but they argued for some reason.

The DA goes for Reacher Now the prosecuting attorney, Rodin, knows all about Reacher, met him in some of the meetings the lawyers have had about the Barr case, and has become fixated on the idea that Reacher is influencing his daughter’s handling of Barr’s defence. In a nutshell, Reacher is holding out hope that Barr might be innocent or there might be extenuating circumstances (which is indeed what Reacher increasingly believes). So when the police find the dead girl’s body and quickly establish a connection between her and Reacher in the brawl at the bar, Rodin is delighted, and tells detective Emerson to put out an all points bulletin to have Reacher arrested. From this point Reacher is on the run, and has to communicate with Helen, Rosemary and Ann from payphones in the dark, or at secret rendezvous. All undercover, on the run, fleeing as the cop car sirens come closer.

If you combine it with the brief scenes we have where Grigor and his men are closing in on Reacher, the whole setup makes for a very tense and dramatic read.

Complications

Barr beaten In the prison where Barr is remanded he is foolish enough to disrespect an extremely fierce Mexican crim, who shows up later with a pack of sidekicks and beats Barr to a pulp. He survives, is put in hospital, initially in a coma but, when he regains consciousness – has amnesia and can’t remember anything about the events of the last few weeks. He is genuinely heart-broken to learn that he shot those people. He has no idea why. A neurologist and psychiatrist test him and both agree it is genuine amnesia. Damn. There goes the main way of finding out what the hell happened.

An old flame Reacher foolishly let slip mention of the Pentagon to the investigator Rodin, who makes enquiries and has the officer in charge of the investigation, Eileen Hutton, subpoenaed to be interviewed. Now Reacher and Hutton had a passionate three-month affair in Kuwait back in the day (1991). They both got posted in different directions. He wonders if she’s changed and gets his hair cut and a close shave specially to meet her.

Love interest Hutton turns up, now an impressive Brigadier-General (p.262), but still hot and sexy like the best Reacher babes are.

  1. When called to be formally interviewed by Rodin, she stonewalls him, denying Barr has any previous form for something like this shooting.
  2. She and Reacher have already hooked up (he goes to meet her) and soon he is hiding out in her hotel suite, making occasional forays out to investigate, and in between enjoying the kind of large-scale, bed-shattering sex which Reacher specialises in.

Questions Was it the Russians who blackmailed Barr into carrying out the killing? Why? Why did they want it to be a copycat of his Kuwait City killing spree? Will Reacher discover their existence and role in the plot before they contrive to have him arrested or bumped off? What lies behind the whole plot, what are they up to? Is the secret in the background of Barr the killer? Or is it something to do with one of the five murdered civilians? If so, which one?

And how many more times can Hutton and Reacher have wild, championship sex?

You’ll have to read the book to find the answers for yourself 🙂

One shot

The title has several different meanings. When Barr shot the five commuters down, he actually fired six shots. One of them he deliberately fired into an ornamental pond they were walking past, knowing the bullet would be slowed down and easily recovered by police forensics. But it was also a message to an expert like Reacher, the type of glitch or anomaly which recurs in all the books, a slight blip which sets our hero thinking: Why did a drop-dead ace sniper, firing from less than forty yards, miss one shot? What was he trying to say?

Then in the second half of the book, Reacher travels to a shooting range in Kentucky which he has discovered that Barr used to visit to practice at. The range is owned by a tough, blunt ex-Marine who refuses to answer any questions about Barr (who is, by this stage, has been all over the TV news and the papers). But Reacher notices an old target paper with five near bull’s eyes, the record of a Marine winning some shooting contest back in the day, and realises it’s a trophy of the old Marine. Reacher compliments him on his shooting. Mollified, the Marine gets out his own personal rifle and challenges Reacher to do as well. Gives him one bullet.

The implication is clear. Reacher has one shot. If he can match the Marine’s accuracy, the guy will talk, tell him the story, clear up the mystery.

One shot to unlock the truth. Will he succeed?

Well, it turns out that Reacher himself won the U.S. Marine Corps Thousand Yard Invitational Competition in 1988. Will he succeed? Hell yeah.

One shot? That’s all Jack Reacher ever needs!

How to sound American

1. Vocabulary

the air = air conditioning in a car or building e.g. ‘The air was set very cold and smelled of sharp chemical flavours’ (p.166)

black-and-white = police patrol car

blacktop = anything covered in asphalt e.g. a highway, parking lot, drive

boardwalk = a constructed pedestrian walkway, often alongside a beach

done deal = an irrevocable agreement

duct work = external pipes and ventilators

dumpster = big metal container for rubbish, a skip

hardscrabble = adjective denoting origins in hard work and poverty

heartland = term for the U.S. states which don’t touch water, denotes down-home, traditional values

in back = at the back of something, especially a building

a laugher = a sporting match or competition which is so easily won by one team or competitor that it seems absurd

a lube shop = garage which specialises in changing the oil and checking lubrication of all moving parts on a car

mirandise = to read a suspect their Miranda rights i.e. ‘you have the right to remain silent…’

porch glider = a type of rocking chair that moves as a swing seat, where the entire frame consists of a seat attached to the base by means of a double-rocker four-bar linkage

prowl car = police patrol car

sidewalk = pavement

slam dunk = a type of basketball shot that is performed when a player jumps in the air, controls the ball above the horizontal plane of the rim, and scores by putting the ball directly through the basket with one or both hands; used to mean a dead certainty

squared away = American military term meaning above satisfactory level for a sustained period: good, neat, tidy, trim

a turnout = the triangular shaped junction of a country road with a bigger road

window reveal = recess surrounding a window, of which the bottom forms the ledge, on which people often set items like vases or books

2. Know your weapons

Americans love guns. Not necessarily all Americans, just enough to provide a steady supply of mass shootings. And, after all, this novel is about a mass shooter.

Here’s Child’s description of the weapon which James Barr uses to execute the five rush-hour commuters.

It was a Springfield M1A Super Match autoloader, American walnut stock, heavy premium barrel, ten shot box magazine, chambered for the .308. It was the exact commercial equivalent of the M14 self-loading sniper rifle that the American military had used during his long-ago years in the service. It was a fine weapon. Maybe not quite as accurate as a top-of-the-line bolt gun, but it would do. It would do just fine…. It was loaded with Lake City M852s. His favourite custom cartridges. Special Lake City Match brass, Federal powder, Sierra Matchking 168-grain hollow point boat tail bullets. The load was better than the gun, probably. (p.14)

This is the gun which ex-Marine sergeant Cash offers Reacher to test how well the latter can shoot on his firing range.

It was a Remington M24, with a Leopold Ultra scope and a front bipod. A standard-issue Marine sniper’s weapon. It looked to be well used but in excellent condition…
‘One shot,’ said Cash. He took a single cartridge from his pocket. Held it up. It was a .300 Winchester round. Match grade. (p.344)

And at the climax of the book, Reacher faces off with the Russian shooter, Chenko, who is armed with a sawn-off shotgun.

It had been a Benelli Nova Pump. The stock had been cut off behind the pistol grip. The barrel had been hacked off behind the pistol grip. The barrel had been hacked off ahead of the slide. Twelve-gauge. Four-shot magazine. A handsome weapon, butchered. (p.492)

Child has obviously done a lot of research into modern weaponry.

A man’s world

Reacher operates in the world of the police and army, against violent criminals. It is an unremittingly violent and generally very male world.

Intelligent women exist in it – lawyers, pilots, cops – in fact, Child takes a small but noticeable pleasure in upsetting sexist expectations and mentioning minor characters like a pilot or a lawyer or a doctor, letting you assume they’re men – and then revealing that they’re women (like Dr McBannerman in Tripwire, who Child assumes to be a grizzled old Scotsman but turns out to be a trim, professional woman doctor).

But the women are all, by definition, smaller and weaker than Reacher (everyone is smaller and weaker than Reacher) so he always ends up defending them.

Examples of hyper-violence include:

  • the sniper shooting five civilians, which kick starts the plot
  • the sniper, James Barr, is then beaten and stabbed in prison by an extremely hard Mexican gang
  • we hear a retrospective account of Barr’s shooting of four unarmed men in Kuwait City
  • five rednecks, led by Jeb Oliver, take on Reacher in a bar fight
  • the Russians murder Jeb Oliver, cut off his hands and head and bury the body parts in different places
  • the Russians murder Sandy the dolly bird by getting big Vladimir to punch her once on the side of the head
  • the finale in which Reacher:
    • stabs one Russian in the neck
    • bear hugs another to death
    • throws Chenko out a third floor window

Jokes

Reacher has a rare but nice way with ironic asides.

‘You know much about head injuries?’
‘Only the ones I cause.’ (p.113)

‘You’re new in town,’ she said.
‘Usually,’ he said. (p.128)

‘I know who you are,’ she said.
‘So do I,’ he said. (p.326)

Reacher’s diet

For breakfast Reacher has the full monty, always including fried eggs and black coffee. For lunch and dinner, cheeseburgers and onion rings, washed down by beer. For another breakfast a ham and egg muffin followed by two slices of lemon pie (p.234). For lunch, a grilled cheese sandwich (p.254). Later, a big sirloin steak in Hutton’s hotel room.

How does he keep in any kind of shape?

Jack Reacher’s rules for bar fighting

Rule one – Be on your feet and ready
Rule two – Show them what they’re messing with
Rule three – Identify the ringleader
Rule four – The ringleader is the one who moves first
Rule five – Never back off
Rule six – Don’t break the furniture
Rule seven – Act, don’t react
Rule eight – Assess and evaluate
Rule nine – Don’t run head-on into Jack Reacher (pp.129-132)

Intelligent, thoughtful, hyper-violent, gun-crazy fun. Find a pool, find a lounger, turn off your phone and enjoy!

Credit

One Shot by Lee Child was published in 2005 by Bantam Press. All quotes are from the 2012 film tie-in edition.

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Reviews of other Jack Reacher novels

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by Simon on August 7, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 7, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/08/07/one-shot-lee-child/

Killing Floor by Lee Child (1997)

‘He seemed like a capable guy to me. Tell the truth, you remind me of him. You seem like a capable guy to me, too.’
(Hubble to Reacher, page 112)

After reading the 20th Jack Reacher novel I went back to the first novel in the series to see how it all started. Violently, is the answer.

I was arrested in Eno’s diner.

is the opening sentence which commences Jack Reacher’s first adventure and inaugurates the series of 22 bestselling crime thrillers in which he features.

Margrave Reacher asks the driver of a Greyhound bus to stop at the little town of Margrave, in Georgia, purely on a whim because he’d had a postcard from his brother Joe, saying the famous blues singer Blind Blake lived or played here.

Arrested But instead of moseying about town and talking music with the locals, he finds himself locked up and interrogated by the (Harvard-educated and fairly reasonable, and black) homicide detective Farley. Why? Because a body has been found at the warehouses Reacher must have walked past on the way into town. The corpse had been shot in the head twice, his face blown off, and then the body frenziedly kicked so that every bone in his body had been smashed.

Hubble Reacher is fingerprinted and photographed by the good-looking, relaxed woman police officer Roscoe. Then questioned by detective Farley. During this process, it emerges that the name of a local businessman was scribbled on a piece of paper scrunched up in the dead man’s shoe, one Paul Hubble. When he is brought in for questioning, to everyone’s amazement he enthusiastically confesses to doing the murder himself, even though there is all kinds of evidence that he didn’t, such as that he was at a party where loads of witnesses saw him.

Farley Over the course of questioning, the relationship between Farley and Reacher softens and becomes a sort of collaboration, because Reacher was himself a Military Policeman in the U.S. Army for 14 years and has carried out lots of investigations himself. He is able to provide a stone cold alibi – he was 400 miles away on the Greyhound at the time of the murder – and begins to help a sceptical Farley think through the various oddities and possibilities of the case.

Prison Despite starting to think Reacher is not guilty, Farley sends both him and Hubble to the local prison for the weekend, where he is meant to be held in the transient, custody cells. However, the head of the prison accidentally on purpose has them put in the main, long-term prison area.

Attacks Here not one but two violent attacks are made on Hubble and Reacher. The first is led by the enormous, terrifying head of the black gang in the prison. The leader is intimidating feeble rich guy Hubble into kneeling and giving him a blow job when Reacher, with a sigh, realises he has to intervene in order to maintain respect and kudos. So Reacher confronts and then nuts the man, smashing most of his face.

Strangling Later, in the showers, the pair are attacked by a posse of white Aryan supremacists. One tries to strangle him but Reacher breaks his fingers before gouging out one of his eyes, while kicking in the larynx of another one, at which point the black gang arrive to attack the Aryans and a general prison riot ensues, during which Reacher and Hubble are evacuated back to the holding cells where they should have been all along.

Capable man So far so violent. But also, so far, so incredibly capable of six-foot-five Reacher, ex-U.S. Military Police and a man with a lifetime’s experience of winning super-violent brawls. Taking down the hardest black guy in the prison. And then three of the hardest whites. Wow.

Hubble talks Saving Hubble’s life gives Reacher power over Hubble who proceeds to talk, or at least to admit that there is something big, really big, going on in Margrave. It involves about ten people and Hubble admits he plays a key part. But ‘they’ have threatened that if he talks, to anyone, they will nail him to the wall of his house, cut off his balls and make his wife eat them, and then perform unspeakable acts on his two little children. Hence Hubble’s catatonic fear. This is why, as soon as Farley told him about the murdered man with his name and number in his shoe, Hubble confessed in such a hurry. He (mistakenly) thought he would be safe in prison. Er, no.

The investigator Hubble admits that the Big Scam and the frighteners ‘they’ were putting on him had prompted him to hire an investigator, anonymously, to help him find a way out. When Farley told him about the corpse at the warehouse, Hubble realised it was the investigator who the gang must have murdered. And so Hubble panicked, because of the threat to his family.

Reacher realises it wasn’t a mistake that he and Hubble were put in the permanent part of the prison rather than the milder and safer custody cells. Someone fixed it up with the prison supervisor, who then tipped off the Aryan Supremacists in particular, to kill him. Why? What has he done to anyone?

Released Reacher is finally released because his alibi, that he only got off the Greyhound bus eight hours after the murder was committed, pans out, with eye witness testimony from the bus driver and other passengers. By this time Reacher has struck up an edgy relationship with the black detective, Farley. Called in for a debrief Reacher shares  his thoughts on what is really going on.

Joe Reacher So Reacher is in the police office when the identification of the fingerprints of the faceless body in the warehouse arrive. Reacher’s life – and the whole book – takes a big lurch when he learns that the dead man is… his brother, his only kin in the world (both parents being dead), Joe his older brother that he used to stick by through thick and thin throughout their long, peripatetic childhood, as sons of a U.S. soldier, continually moving from one military base to another around the world.

His whole life they had looked out for each other and now… Joe is dead. That’s right, dead.

And to a man like Reacher (a six-foot-five inch, ex-Military Policeman with a taste for clear, logical thinking and the capacity for seriously hurting anyone who gets in his way) this can only mean one thing.

Finding the guys who did it, and taking his revenge. Looking out for Joe one last time. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do (or, more precisely, a man’s gotta kill who a man’s gotta kill).

The rest of the novel follows the intricate sequence of clues and discoveries by which Reacher, now working closely with detective Farley, and with the sexy Police Officer Roscoe, protect Hubble and his family from ‘them’, and realise that ‘they’ have representatives within the police force who are shadowing and reporting on all their discoveries.

The revelation of the big scam is nicely paced. There are plenty of surprises and unexpected shocks. The violence gets extreme, particularly when the corrupt, fat, old head of the police department gets the Hubble treatment i.e. gets nailed to the wall, his balls cut off, his wife forced to eat them, yuk.

Justified revenge Reacher identifies the glaring, threatening son of the old man who ‘owns’ half the town as the psychopath who carried out these gruesome acts and – in a tense scene – disposes of him and his three accomplices when they arrive at the (now empty) Hubble family home, to murder them.

Instead Reacher is waiting for them and takes them out, one by one, in a display of unstoppable physical supremacy reminiscent of other male heroes played by the likes of Clint Eastwood or Bruce Willis or Jason Bourne.

Factual information

As so often with thrillers, at the book’s core is a whole load of factual information which is interesting in its own right.

Counterfeiting The Big Scam turns out to be an enormous money counterfeiting operation, which explains Reacher’s brother’s involvement. Joe had risen to be the head of the FBI’s anti-counterfeiting unit, as we learn when Reacher visits some of the counterfeiting experts he worked with.

Through their mouths we learn a lot about the history of counterfeiting. We learn that the academics worked as young men during World War Two on a plan to bankrupt the Nazi economy by dropping billions of fake Deutschmarks into Germany.

There is then quite a lengthy explanation of how U.S. currency is designed and manufactured.

Assuming it’s true, this all makes for very interesting reading.

The unexpected plot twists, reversals and betrayals continue virtually up to the last page. It is a very impressive updating of the basic thriller genre for our times (well, the 1990s) and you can see why Reacher, with his size, physical competence, military experience and calm logical thinking made, and continues to make, such an impression on fans of the genre.

Broken sentences

The twentieth novel was told in short punchy sentences by a third-person narrator. This, the first book in the series, is told in short, punchy sentences in the first person.

In fact the nature of the narrator is irrelevant: first person or third person, everyone in Reacherworld thinks and speaks the same way, laconic, to the point, logical, tough.

‘They killed him,’ she said. Just a simple statement. ‘Like they killed Joe. I think I know how you must be feeling.’
I nodded.
‘They’ll pay for it,’ I said. ‘For both of them.’
‘You bet your ass,’ she said. (p.346)

More noticeable in this one than in number 20 is Child’s habit of breaking up what could be one long-ish sentence describing people performing consecutive actions, into a sequence of short sentences, each one describing just one specific action, with the subject of each verb carried over by implication.

He stood still for a moment then took out the key and unlocked them. Clipped them back on his belt. Looked at me. (p.18)

I used the john and rinsed my face in the sink. Pulled myself up into the bed. Took off my shoes. Left them on the foot of the bed. (p.79)

We drove for miles. Found the right terminal. Missed a lane change and passed the short-term parking. Came around again and lined up to the barrier. (p.312)

There are hundreds of examples, some extending for five or six consecutive pronoun-less clauses, each of which has been turned into a short, snappy, freestanding sentence.

He took out the tape machine. Dragged out the cords. Positioned the microphone between us. Tested it with his fingernail. Rolled the tape back. Ready. (p.38)

There are plenty of three-word-long sentences. Some two. Or one. All working to the same end, conveying a no-nonsense, tough guy, to the point, no fat on the bone, macho mindset.

Finlay and I hitched ourselves into the barber chairs. Put our feet up on the chrome rests. Started reading. (p.326)

The tone says, ‘Of course he’s been interviewed before. Held in police custody. Put in handcuffs. Locked in a cell. He’s a Real Man. Had plenty of fights. Outstared plenty of cops. Toughed out many a gaol cell. All par for the course. Meat and drink.’

Analysis

But Reacher is not just a fighting machine. He is a computer. He analyses and assesses. Repeatedly Reacher tells us that his military training and, specifically his long years of work in the Military Police, have taught him to process information, to work through it methodically. Many of the breakthroughs come from anomalies planted earlier in the narrative, little things someone said or did which, on reflection, Reacher realises stand out, don’t make sense, are clues.

Evaluate. Long experience had taught me to evaluate and assess. When the unexpected gets dumped on you, don’t waste time. Don’t figure out how or why it happened. Don’t recriminate. Don’t figure out whose fault it is. Don’t work out how to avoid the same mistake next time. All of that you can do later. If you survive. First of all you evaluate. Analyse the situation. Identify the downside. Assess the upside. Plan accordingly. Do all that and you give yourself a better chance of getting through to the other stuff later. (p.83)

The novel is larded with little homilies like this, advice on how to handle situations. Reacher says much of it stems from his military training, so I wonder how much of it is derived from the no doubt numerous and copious handbooks for soldiers and the military police which Child must have used in his research. How much from police training. How much Child has made up.

This habit of sharing his life wisdom with us is a leading characteristic of the books. In Tripwire we learn that Reacher’s mentor, Leon Garber, had various rules for living, which Reacher usefully quotes as he applies them to the perilous situations he finds himself. Similarly, One Shot has a great scene where Reacher tackles five rednecks in a bar and shares with us Reacher’s Nine Rules for Bar Fights.

It comes as in surprise to learn that 21 years after this first book, and 22 novels into the series, Child has written enough text like this – life advice, how to think through problems, how to survive confrontations – that it has been cut and pasted into a stand-alone book, Reacher’s Rules: Life Lessons From Jack Reacher, which was published in 2012.

And all the characters are like this. They all spend a lot of time whirring and clicking like computers. They all have their own agendas (make money, run a crime outfit, assassinate anyone who gets in the way, or solve crimes, find the suspect, collect evidence etc). Everyone has projects and agendas and, in Reacherworld, you can watch them processing every new development into their thinking and adjusting their plans accordingly.

He was thinking hard… I had never seen someone think so visibly. His mouth was working soundlessly and he was fiddling with his fingers. Like he was checking off positives and negatives. Weighing things up. I watched him. I saw him make his decision. He turned and looked over at me. (p.92)

There are regular spurts of violence – fights, brawls, taking down armed men – and each novel includes at least one scene of really gruesome, sadistic bloodshed. And it’s this which, inevitably, readers often remember. Not least because of the cold-blooded efficiency with which Reacher – once provoked – kills the bad guys.

He dropped the shotgun. It thudded into the carpet. I pulled him backward and turned him and ran him out through the door. Into the downpour. Dug my fingers deeper into his eyes. Hauled his head back. Cut his throat. You don’t do it with one elegant swipe. Not like in the movies. No knife is sharp enough for that. There’s all sorts of tough gristle in the human throat. You have to saw back and forth with a lot of strength. Takes a while. But it works. It works well. By the time you’ve sawed back to the bone, the guy is dead. This guy was no exception. His blood hosed out and mixed with the rain. He sagged against my grip. Two down. (p.407)

But even the violence is highly thought about and planned. The fight scenes are notable for the care Child takes to explain how Reacher assesses every situation, estimates the angles, uses all his training to calculate how to win.

I was trained by experts. Guys who traced their own training back to World War Two, Korea, Vietnam. People who had survived things I had only read about in books. They taught me methods, details, skills. Most of all they taught me attitude. They taught me that inhibitions would kill me. Hit early, hit hard. Kill with the first blow. Get your retaliation in first. Cheat. The gentlemen who behaved decently weren’t there to train anybody. They were already dead. (p.85)

In summary, the majority of the text is made up of people planning, thinking and assessing. The books are a lot more about ratiocination and thinking through problems – combat situations, strategic planning, problem analysis, plan-making – than you might expect.

I looked all over the place. Looked at where Teale was sitting, looked at the office inner door, checked Kliner’s line of fire, guessed where Roscoe and Charlie might end up. I calculated angles and estimated distances. I came up with one definite conclusion. (p.503)

Reacher girls

Of course there’s a girl, by which I mean young woman, who fancies Reacher from the get-go and on page 163 of this 523-page-long novel they finally have the wild passionate sex the reader has seen on the cards for some time. Tear each other’s clothes off. She rides him till they collapse in a sweaty heap, spent and sated. Shower then do it all over again, etc. Championship sex.

If James Bond has ‘Bond girls’ then Jack Reacher appears to have ‘Reacher girls’, and every bit as improbable.

This one, Officer Roscoe, is part of the Margrave Police Department. When Reacher is first brought in, she gets him a cup of coffee. She is friendly. She leans her breasts against the desk when she takes his fingerprints, with a dazzling smile on her face. She is there to collect Reacher when he gets out of prison after his eventful few days inside. She drives him to Hubble’s house to interview him, though Hubble has gone missing. When Reacher is there at the police department when the news comes through the fax that the dead man is his brother, Roscoe holds his hand.

And then back to her place for wild sex.

Roscoe put on the clothes she’d brought from her place in the morning. Jeans, shirt, jacket. Looked wonderful. Very feminine, but very tough. She had a lot of spirit. (p.284)

I’m sure we have all met woman police officers just like Officer Roscoe.

Related links

Reviews of other Jack Reacher novels

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by Simon on August 6, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in America, Books, Thriller
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Posted by Simon on August 6, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/killing-floor-lee-child/

Make Me by Lee Child (2015)

We can’t fight thirty people. To which Reacher’s natural response was: Why the hell not? It was in his DNA. Like breathing. He was an instinctive brawler. His greatest strength, and his greatest weakness. (p.136)

Make Me is the 20th novel in the series featuring tough ex-U.S. Army Military Policeman-turned-investigator, Jack Reacher.

The series is immensely popular, with every one of the novels having been optioned for movies, and two – One Shot and Never Go Back – made into ‘major motion pictures’ starring Tom Cruise. Which is odd since Cruise is famously on the short side (5 feet 6 inches) whereas the whole point of Jack Reacher is that he is a hulking bear of a man (six foot five).

Lee Child

The single most interesting thing about the Jack Reacher novels and their star, the tall, street wise, intelligent and bullet-proof American tough guy, is that their author is English.

Lee Child was born in Coventry and grew up in Birmingham. You can hardly get less glamorous and more provincially English than that. What turned him into an international publishing phenomenon? Eighteen years working with Granada TV, writing trailers, introductions, commercials and news stories. This honed his skills for getting to the point. (In fact Lee Child is a nom de plume: his real names is James Grant.)

Praise

The cover of the book is festooned with praise from his peers in the thriller-writing business, such luminaries as James Patterson, Michael Connelly, Ken Follett, Stephen King and Frederick Forsyth. It is noticeable that all the women writers describe Reacher in terms of physique and sexual attractiveness.

Patricia Cornwell says she picks up Reacher ‘when I’m in the mood for someone big to solve my problems.’

Karin Slaughter says Reacher is ‘one of the sexiest characters in fiction.’

Joanne Harris says reading Reacher is ‘one of my essential guilty pleasures.’

The most revealing comment is from British journalist Lucy Mangan:

I am very much in love with Jack Reacher – as a man and a role model. If I can’t shag him, then I want to be him.

(The bold is in the originals.) Reacher is tall, blonde and handsome, He is strong and silent. He protects women and the vulnerable. He doesn’t start trouble but if there is trouble he can more than handle himself in a fight. ‘What do women want?’ Freud is said to have asked. Jack Reacher, apparently.

Slow buildup

I was surprised and then amazed at how slow-moving this novel is, very slow, very slow-moving indeed. It has 492 pages divided into fifty-nine short punchy chapters (8.3 pages per chapter, though each one manages to feel much briefer because of the snappy writing).

By half way through, the following has happened: Reacher has stepped off a train at a remote and minuscule settlement in the American mid-West, intrigued by its incongruous name, Mother’s Rest. A woman steps out of the shadows as he strolls towards the central strip of town, clearly expecting him to be somebody she knows, then realises he isn’t.

They get chatting and it emerges that she is Michelle Chang (a name as tokenistically ethnic, but really as bland and commonplace as his own). Chang is ex-FBI, now a freelance investigator, having set up a detective agency with a few other investigators in the same situation. One of them was named Keever. He called in to tell the others that he was investigating something here in Mother’s Rest, then disappeared. She’s come to find out why.

We, the readers, know why – because Child opened a novel with a description of ‘them’ – an unnamed group of men – burying Keever. He’s dead. They killed him. This much we know. But why?

Very slowly Reacher gets drawn into Chang’s problem, not least because he is irked by the unfriendliness of the guys in town. (All men are referred to as ‘guys’ throughout.) The one-eyed owner of the only motel in town is twitchy and nervous, refuses to answer questions about Keever, keeps an obvious eye on Reacher and Chang.

As Reacher moseys round the small town he realises he is being followed by a kid and that various store owners lift the phone as he walks by – phoning in his progress to a central figure, who goes unnamed – we only know that he wears pressed jeans and has blow-dried hair. Ooh. Creepy! They are all nervous about the way Reacher is snooping around. They all talk about ‘us’, and how ‘we’ will have to take some action…

Reacher and Chang decide to drive to Keever’s apartment in Oklahoma City to find out more. Some guys from Mother’s Rest follow them as they drive. Reacher stops the car, gets out, confronts them and, as they go for their guns, kicks one in the nuts and smashes the other’s cheekbone with his elbow. He’s so tough. He’s so strong. Men want to be him. Women want to shag him. The appeal really does seem to be as primitive as that.

Reacher’s ‘technique’ is thoroughness

Sherlock Holmes’s deductions are clever and unexpected. Reacher’s feel far more obvious. He and Chang find a scrunched-up note in Keever’s room with a phone number and a name on it. They ring the number. It’s a science journalist in LA named Westwood. He agrees to meet them. They fly to LA. The science journalist explains that he gets calls from cranks all the time. Reacher guesses that whoever had hired Keever might be one of these cranks. They check Westwood’s database of calls. They systematically ring them all and eliminate all the obvious fruitcakes or unanswered calls. This narrows it down. One particular caller made lots of calls from Chicago, from a number they identify as the public library. They fly to Chicago. They take a taxi to a hotel. They check in.

By this stage Reacher and Chang have got beyond edgy camaraderie, progressed to sharing theories and hunches, and have had dinner together. He is tall, blonde and handsome with eyes of Arctic blue. She is lean and fit with curves in all the right places. Go on. Guess what happens.

Yep. They go to bed. What do women want? To be wined and dined, to be respected and courted. And then to be shagged senseless by a tall, super-capable man. Repeatedly. In hotel rooms across America.

They visit the public library in Chicago where the calls came from. They interview the librarian who knew the old, sad man who they now think was the caller, Keever’s client, the instigator of Keever’s investigation, name of McCann.

As I mentioned, Sherlock Holmes’s deductions are deliberately made outlandish and improbable. By contrast, at every step of the way Reacher is shown working through the possibly scenarios with very clear logic and application. If Reacher has a method, it is extreme thoroughness. At every stage, almost on every page, there are options and alternatives. He considers them rationally and logically. He works through them. He chooses the best one. It generally proves to be correct.

There is more than a touch of Mr Spock about Reacher.

Lucky man

But one of the things that makes this an example of genre fiction is the easiness, the fluency and the luck. Reacher is lucky, continually lucky.

He speculates that it was Keever’s client who called the LA journalist – and is proved right.

He speculates that the caller will have called in a specific time window 3 to 4 months earlier – and is proved right.

He guesses that the caller, having been blocked by the journalist as a nuisance, will change his name and continue calling, but call from the same number or area code. He does, and that’s what helps them recognise the fake name he uses second time round, which in turn leads them to his real name – McCann.

(It helps that Chang has a contact in the US telephone system who does her favours and helps them identify the various numbers.)

All this evidence narrows the search down to Chicago so they fly there, check into a hotel, have sex, then visit the library. All of which proves to be the correct deduction.

Similarly, the polite lady librarian at the Chicago public library won’t give them the address of the man they have now identified as McCann, out of a sense of confidentiality – but Reacher asks a series of tangenital questions about whether he drove or took public transport to work (walked) and his health (poor) from which they deduce that McCann’s home must be among the surrounding three blocks. Which is correct.

A block away from the library is a dusty old pharmacy which sells the kind of temporary cell phones (known as ‘burners’) which they speculate that McCann used. So Reacher guesses that the old boy walked past it on his walk to the library – so his house must be in that general direction. Which turns out to be correct.

The librarian had said that McCann gave the impression that he was ashamed of where he lived. So Reacher guesses it’s not a nice house but an apartment, probably in a rundown block. And so it is that after half an hour of working along the street, looking at nameplates to every flat on every apartment block, Michelle finds one with ‘Peter McCann’ on it.

They pretend to be making a delivery in order to get buzzed into the block, walk up to the apartment in question, to find the door is open.

And so on.

At every juncture Reacher makes reasonable enough guesses based on the odds, working things through steadily and methodically. But he is always lucky. The cards always fall his way. The time period of calls to the journalist turns out to be dead right. Chicago turns out to be the right hunch as location for the mysterious client. Guessing the pharmacy is the one where McCann bought his disposable phones turns out to be right. His apartment has a nice legible name label (unlike most I’ve ever visited) – and it gives McCann’s real name. The door to the apartment is unlocked.

Same with women. Reacher’s guesstimates about how to pace things in his relationship with Chang turn out to be picture perfect – when to hold off, when to be polite and professional, when to be slightly more personal, when to take her to dinner, when to wait for her signal, when to make a first move (a kiss) and when to take her to bed – all turn out to be right. He is right all the time. About everything.

Tall, tough and handsome, and always right.

Fighting

This supernatural skillfulness comes into its own in the many scenes of violence, fighting and shooting.

When he gets out of the car he and Chang are driving to Oklahoma City to confront the two toughs who have been tailing them – the reader partakes in his expert assessment of the situation, his estimate of where best to stand in order to a) kick one in the nuts and still have time to b) smash the other in the face.

When an assassin confronts them outside Keever’s apartment, we once again share Reacher’s immensely detailed calculation of the best way to handle the situation, and a literal blow-by-blow account of the fight.

Later in the book, Reacher and Chang go to visit McCann’s sister to find out more about his motives for hiring Keever. She’s married to a rich doctor and they’re supervising wedding celebrations for their grown-up daughter when three assassins hired by the Mother’s Rest people burst in. Three assassins with guns. Once again Child gives us an extremely detailed account of how Reacher thinks through the problem, works the angles, creates a diversion, and ends up killing all three and saving himself, Chang and McCann’s sister’s family unscathed.

We see his careful planning and calculations, so it’s not dumb luck. He thinks the problem through, calculates the angles, waits for the right moment, and so on.

Still pretty lucky, though.

When they figure out that the assassins were sent by ‘the fat man’, who is the head of the organisation of hitmen and which has been sub-contracted by the Mother’s Rest mob to rub them out – Chang and Reacher:

a) easily identify the nightclub which is a front for the gang
b) find the gate to the fenced compound around the club conveniently open
c) find the fat man sitting inside the compound, so that
d) Reacher can walk up to him, shoot him in the head, turn and walk away.

No bodyguards protecting him, no-one comes bursting out of the club firing at him. Lucky, huh?

Reacher is always right, about everything.

No wonder men want to be him. No wonder women want to shag him.

Characteristics of a Jack Reacher novel

Simple Child’s prose style is pared right back in the standard thriller style.

1. Partly because all modern American prose is pared back – generations of American creative writing teachers have told all their students to go over and over their manuscripts to remove unnecessary adjectives or adverbs, to keep it simple. So now American prose is simple. Doesn’t mean it can’t be thoughtful, though. Imaginative. Evocative.

Three Rugers [a type of gun], three guys. Black clothes, scalped hair, pale skin. Big enough and heavy enough, but also somehow bony. Tight cheekbones. Hard times in their DNA, from not too long ago. From Europe, maybe. Far in the marshy east. Every man against his neighbour, for the last thousand years. (p.330)

2. Partly because over the past hundred years the masculine world of crime fiction with its strong silent types has been associated with tough, no-nonsense prose for tough, no-nonsense guys. Hard boiled. Nothing soft or wishy-washy. True since the 1920s at least. Dashiell Hammett. Keep it simple.

Simple sentences. Short sentences. Sometimes three words. Or two. One. Limited vocabulary. Repetition.

Reacher listened hard, and heard nothing.
He stepped around the desk to the private side.
He glanced at the ledgers. And the files. And the notebooks. Routine motel stuff. Accounts, orders, to-do lists, percentages.
He listened again. Heard nothing.
He opened a drawer. Where the guy kept the room keys. He put 113 in, and took 215 out.
He closed the drawer.
He stepped back to the public side.
He breathed out. (p.73)

It gives a bleached-out, empty effect. Obviously designed to be tense and taut. Minimum perceptions. Human as robot, as terminator, stripped of all uncertainty and hesitation. Human as pure knowing, calculating machine.

A gated community. Rich people. Taxpayers. Political donors. The Maricopa County sheriffs on speed dial.
They waited at the kerb, a hundred yards short.
It was three in the afternoon. Five, in Chicago.
There was one guard behind the glass.
Reacher said, ‘We should have figured.’
Chang said, ‘If she’s heard about her brother, we’ll never get in.’ (p.291)

Said When characters talk they never question, answer, reply, respond, smirk. They never do anything with any colour or inflection. They just ‘say’. She said. He said. The guy said. They said.

Chang said, ‘He could be a brother or a cousin…’
‘He looks like the boss,’ Reacher said…
Chang said, ‘We have to be certain…’
Reacher said, ‘Did your contact mention family members?’..
Chang said, ‘We don’t know of any family members.’
‘He looks like the boss,’ Reacher said… (p.352)

The deliberate reduction of the complex and multi-faceted human activity of speaking, questioning, answering, discussing and joking down to one monotonously reiterated word – ‘said’-  typifies the general strategy of simplification.

All men are ‘guys’. All roads are blacktop. Taxis are taxis. They took a taxi to the hotel. It was part of a chain. The Mothers Rest hard goods store is like hundreds of others. The pharmacy in Chicago is the type you see everywhere.

Hardly anything is really described, certainly not given any detailed vibe or atmosphere. That would require invoking an element of subjectivity on the part of the narrator, that would involve soft, wishy-washy feelings and perceptions and these – in this genre – are banned.

Instead, atmosphere is almost entirely implied by Reacher’s reactions to a situation, sizing up the guy, weighing the odds, calculating the angles.

Paused a beat Hence another characteristic: characters often pause in speaking — pause a beat or, in another common phrase, pause until the silence becomes uncomfortable.

He paused a beat… She was quiet for a long moment, five or six seconds, right to the edge of discomfort. (p.492)

During these pauses the characters – mostly Reacher – are calculating the odds, thinking the problem through.

Which Another mannerism is, after anyone has made a decision or acted a certain way, to have a short sentence starting with ‘which’ and approving it.

Which made sense. (p.349)

Which was a good question. (p.468)

Which was good. (p.457)

If you say it out loud, in a slow tough guy drawl, you can see how it conveys laconic, wise approval. One pro nodding approval of another pro. Good choice. Wise move.

The bloody climax

In the end, you won’t be surprised to learn that the sleepy little ville of Mother’s Rest does indeed contain a gruesome and disgusting secret, a secret so sordid and violent that the townspeople are all jumpy whenever a stranger arrives, and have outsourced ‘protection’ to a Ukrainian mobster, Merchenko, and his hitmen.

(These are the hitmen Reacher deals with in the scene where they invade McCann’s sister’s house in Phoenix – referred to above – which prompts him to track down and coolly execute Merchenko.)

In fact, there turn out to be two secrets, a secret within a secret, which is very effective, in narrative and thriller terms.

As the plot moves along, Westwood introduces Chang and Reacher to a geek who can access the so-called Dark Web, the vast cyberspace with hidden websites and transactions, mainly used for pornography and crime. He is referred to simply as ‘the guy from Palo Alto’ (p.378).

This guy uses the evidence our team have assembled to tell the following story – a middle-aged man named Peter McCann had a 30-year-old son, Michael, with mental health issues who he was concerned about and who had gone missing on a bus journey through Mother’s Rest. McCann made repeat calls to Westwood asking for his help tracking his son down. Why? Because McCann had written an article way back, one he’d more or less forgotten about, on the subject of the Dark Web, and McCann wanted Westwood’s help in delving into it to find out what happened to his son. McCann had discovered that his son was a frequent visitor to dark websites concerned with suicide.

The guy from Palo Alto confirms all this and goes on to discover that it looks like Michael made a pact with someone he met on the Dark Web to go to Mother’s Rest and be euthanised.

In other words, the dark secret behind the sleepy little town, is that a dozen or so of its inhabitants have set up a euthanasia centre on a remote farm a dozen miles outside of town. Here customers can commit suicide in a number of ways. The guy from Palo Alto tracks down a hidden brochure which lists the methods: injection of poison, carbon monoxide piped into a peaceful room to nice music etc.

Having discovered all this Reacher and Chang return to Mother’s Rest along with Westwood, pretty sure there will be a welcoming committee and there is. The ten or so men in the euthanasia syndicate have posted lookouts around the town and are waiting with guns.

There is a very bloody shootout. Reacher and Chang lure out of the stronghold, cosh and tie up five of the baddies, before the situation degenerates into a prolonged shoutout with the other five.

Despite being trapped in a large shed-like building with the baddies firing rifle bullets through the thin walls, our heroes survive unscathed, while despatching all five of the armed baddies. Lucky, eh?

It is only during the shootout that they discover there is an even darker side, to the euthanasia setup than they had originally thought. I won’t give it away, partly because it’s so disgusting, partly because… you should read it yourself!

Reacher is a calculating machine

By page 492 – in among the violence, the pared-back prose style, the inevitable championship sex between Chang and Reacher and the incredible fluency and mobility of American life (on one level the book is a blizzard of planes and trains and coaches and taxis and hotels and gold cards) –  I kept being struck by the surprisingly Darwinian nature of its worldview.

The longer it goes on the more you realise that Reacher is a calculating machine – not doing sums, but calculating the odds of everything. What is really going on in Mother’s Rest, why does a shopkeeper glimpsed through a window move his arm (phoning someone?), what are his chances with Chang, how will the assassin in the doorway move next, how accurate will the shooters with their M16 rifles be – and so on. He never stops. He is permanently calculating the odds and possibilities of everything.

Some of this is unconscious. On a number of occasions Child tells us that Reacher is calculating something with the frontal, conscious part of his mind – but meanwhile, the unconscious back part is making its own split-second decisions – what he refers to several times as ‘the lizard brain’.

A forty per cent chance, the back of Reacher’s brain told him, immediately and automatically… (p.332)

Then the guy in the yard opened the slider and stepped inside, and the back of Reacher’s brain showed him the whole chess game right there, laid out, obvious, in flashing neon arrows, in immense and grotesque detail… (p.327)

Meanwhile the guy [Reacher has just shot] was going down vertically, as if he had stepped into an elevator shaft, and Reacher was turning fractionally left, from the waist, shoulders braced, looking for the third-base guy, the furthest away, because some back-of-the-brain calculation was telling him the guy had a better line of fire… (p.337)

It’s like being inside the brain of a cheetah or a leopard, stalking its prey on the savannah, permanently calculating, continually alert to its next move.

At one point Reacher is described as a predator poised above the waterhole. This is exactly what he feels like all the way through. When not being pressed he is gentlemanly and courteous, to old ladies or women like Chang. But when at all pressed, he turns into super-predator, an unrivalled calculator of the odds for fighting and surviving and beating all the opposition in sight.

He’s not just tall and strong and trained to kill in twenty ways. He is a super-predator, a quintessence of the hunter-killer instinct which the biologists tell us is inside all of us.

Which, according to the blurbs, men want to be, and women want to shag – in order to have babies by him, in order to be protected by him.

The heartlessness of American life

Where does Reacher get his money from? There seems to be no end to the train tickets, hire cars, airplane flights, hotel rooms and taxis, taxis everywhere. Credit cards, cell phones, the internet, shiny hire cars, the rich doctor in his gated community, the party by the pool, power breakfasts, brunch in diners, dinners in restaurants – to me there is a sickening surfeit of wealth.

In their films and fictions, Americans seem to take it for granted that they can go anywhere, do anything, eat anything, shoot anyone. By and large Americans don’t realise how rich and privileged they are.

Which makes the contrast with the sickening sadism, violence and general heartlessness of almost the characters so upsetting and disturbing. The novel opens with a murder, there’s a lull while Chang and Reacher slowly uncover the powder trail leading to the gruesome truth – and then a steady increase in tempo of the opponents Reacher has to blow apart, behead, execute and generally eviscerate.

For me there’s an umbilical connection between the two: The casual way they accept the train tickets, plane flights, hire cars, identikit hotel rooms, everything is described in solely functional terms, as expressions of wish and desire. I wanna go there. I’ll getta plane. I’ll hire a car. I’ll getta taxi. I want, I get.

The characters apply the same instrumental mindset to each other. You’re in my way. I gotta kill you. Sorry it ain’t personal, it’s business. I’m being paid to execute you, sorry but a job’s a job.

In the scene where the assassins burst in on Chang and Reacher talking to McCann’s sister and her family, the assassins – once they’ve lined the good guys all up on the sofa – proceed to share the fact that they’re upset: they were paid to kill three people (Chang, Reacher and McCann’s sister) and now they’re confronted with five people. Well, that’s just not fair, is it? If they gotta kill five they want more money. I mean you would too, right? Am I right?

Presumably this scene is meant to be funny. In fact it’s the delay while the assassins try to figure out which of the five people in front of them are the three they’ve been sent to assassinate – Chang, Reacher and McCann’s sister (well, Chang being Chinese is easy enough, but they’re uncertain about the other two) that allows Reacher, with his lizard brain, to contrive a strategy which evens up the odds enough for him to tackle all three assassins and – lucky as usual – to go from sitting on a sofa completely unarmed, to getting the better of three armed assassins. What a guy.

It’s possible to enjoy books like this for the thrill of the narrative, for its tongue-in-cheek hard man prose, for its ridiculous love scenes – but still be appalled by the insight they give into a society which has been hollowed out and lost all its humanity.

Every possible facility of advanced twenty-first century life is laid on for these Americans. And yet, with a kind of tragic inevitability, books like this show how having everything has somehow withered Americans’ humanity and turned them into killing machines. Not every American is a soulless killer, obviously. But our time does seem to be witnessing a plague of mass shootings by Americans with plenty of guns and no soul whatsoever.

Related links

Reviews of other Jack Reacher novels

Leave a comment
by Simon on July 29, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Adventure, America, Books, Thriller
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on July 29, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/07/29/make-me-lee-child/

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