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I've just reread The Visitor and Tripwire, a year after my magnificent SUMMER OF REACHER when I bought One Shot and then read every. Single. Novel. By Lee Child. Without cease. Without fail. They were read and understood. Asked and answered. No fault, no foul.
Revisiting a thriller, when you obviously know the plot and its twists, makes for an interesting experience, and I think it's quite a good test for these novels. My conclusions from these two ~ and perhaps tellingly, I started rereading Killing Floor as well but got sick of it after a chapter because Reacher's first person voice came across as too smug and self-satisfied; maybe it needs the third person to get some measure of ironic distance ~ my overriding conclusion is that they're really very well-written. Not just in plot terms, but in prose. Not just because they're effectively sparse and spartan, because actually they're not that extreme ~ I got this initial impression from the early pages of my first reacher, One Shot, and it may be unrepresentative ~ but they have some very striking, original, well-crafted imagery and very economical but well-chosen vocabulary.
I don't have the novels here for reference, but one thing that struck me is the way Child uses single, neat, quite unusual verbs to immediately convey the exact nature of an image or action: Reacher squeaks a mailbox closed. Harper's car noses up a road. I think I noted before the way other cars jink round corners, and Reacher dabs a phone cradle to get a dial tone.
The books are great about how it feels to drive across the USA as well ~ about US geography in general, in fact, whether it's the really big routes (how to get from Quantico to Spokane by Cessna, what it's like to fly from NYC to Hawaii and back in 24 hours, first class) or just the long drives across no-man's land, sleeping while your partner takes the wheel. The little towns you pass through, the changes in terrain and climate, the colour of the land. It captures the fatigue of travel, but also the occasional wonders along the way. When Harper and Reacher top a mountain range in The Visitor, in the middle of the night, there's a lovely description of the land lying ahead of them looking like it's... carved out of metal, I think? Or perhaps something much better than that. Reacher says something like "It's a big world out there." That book is all about the hobo demon in him that won't let him settle down, and scenes like that really sell you his reasons for wanting to keep going places he's never been; getting off buses in the middle of nowhere, and just walking.
And the details are all so authentic sounding, even if they're bullshit. When Reacher tells you the FBI must have had a year when it bought GM cars, like the army did, cycling between all the major manufacturers so as not to show a preference, and that some other vehicle, I can't remember the marque, was a drug dealer's favorite for a while, some time back, you believe it. You even believe the total crap about drinking ten gallons of water a day as the key to peak fitness. Well, you consider it before rejecting it. You feel you're learning something. I got a kind of satisfaction from working out why a bird colonel was called that, and felt I'd picked up some useful information when Reacher explained that Eisenhower, "a West Pointer all the way" (I knew what he meant, yay me!) had designed the Interstates for military transport. There's a paradoxical (?) geekiness and pedantry about these novels, seeing as they're based around a man-mountain tough guy. But then, the main appeal of Reacher is not just that he'd always protect you if someone messed with you (Because they'd be messing with him. And if they do that, they get what's coming to them. Because that would make him mad. Right.) but that he turns stuff over in his mind for hours like a clever little kid... he thinks about things, on his own, for ages. He entertains himself silently by musing on stuff. And in a way, there's almost a stereotypically feminine aspect about the way he notices people's clothes, and immediately weighs up their salary and their social class: Harper owns three suits (each carefully retailored with darts removed), which is about right for her grade; Lamarr's briefcase is cheap, her suit is dusty and her teeth haven't been fixed, which is what actually helps him crack the whole case. These observations sit quite oddly, but appealingly, with Reacher's bad-assery and no-nonsense machismo.
Though there are contradictions there ~ he notices every detail of someone's outfit, but when he goes to buy clothes himself, he cluelessly aims for the plainest, cheapest chinos in the store, and thinks Gap is called "Hole"? Similarly, he makes accurate deductions about a secretary's behaviour in Tripwire, based on some knowledge about Word documents and office gossip, but house insurance and utility bills throw him into a panic, and he doesn't even know how to clean a coffeemaker in The Visitor.
Anyway, I really enjoyed both those novels on their second run. I don't anticipate that The Hard Way would give me the same pleasure. The Enemy will be interesting, given that I found it hard to deal with the first-person narration in Killing Floor ~ and it's also fascinating to me that the first Reacher I read, uniquely, doesn't introduce him until maybe 100 pages in.
Of course, I've read them totally out of chronology. I was meeting Joe Reacher's ex girlfriend before I knew how he died, or that he died in Killing Floor; in fact, I was metting Joe in flashback before I knew he died in Killing Floor.
So, without conclusion; I may post further updates on my revisiting of Reacher, as I go along.
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I agree by the way about the anonymous, generic villains, particularly unforgiveably in Without Fail. And the re-use of the device of the mass killing meant to disguise one meaningful murder is pretty weak, too... that's the only reason I guessed the end of The Visitor ahead of time, I'm sure. |
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