What Book to Read?

The description of this book on its cover as a page-turner is quite correct, for once.

Lee Child is an author new to me, and this is the only one of his 15 books that I have read. However I suspect that the others follow much the same pattern as Tripwire. His hero is Jack Reacher, an ex military policeman, who becomes more or less inadvertently involved in crime and mystery. He is a loner who shies away from the suburban dream of home and family, a drifter, but with a strong code of honour that makes him want to right wrongs. It helps that he has retained the skills of detection, including an aptitude for both analysis and violence, and is big and strong. His ancestors in popular culture are the lone cowboys who bring justice to the oppressed, then ride off into the sunset.

Child (the pseudonym of Jim Grant) is British by birth, but lives in America and sets his books there. He previously worked as a TV writer and director, and this shows in his prose. His sentences are short and basic. There is just enough description to give the reader a sense of the setting. (Some of it takes place in the World Trade Centre – this book was published in 1999, when it was still standing.) There is a minimum of characterisation; the reader is rarely told in any depth what is going on inside anyone’s head. Some of the characters, particularly the baddies, are mere stereotypes. Quite a lot of the dialogue isn’t particularly convincing.

So what is there to keep the pages turning? You want to find out what happens! Child has come up with a well developed plot, and presents it a way that delivers maximum suspense. In structure, it is a modified version of the hunt/chase scenario. Reacher gets involved in trying to find out what happened to a young soldier who thirty years before went missing in action in Vietnam. The baddies are working to stop him finding out. The action cuts between them in such a way that the reader is kept wondering how Reacher will evade them, and at the same time find out what he needs to know. There is both violence and sex, but Child does not linger over them. There is also a side story that adds to the tension and is integral to the resolution. As a thriller, it works well.

A character that stands outside social structures and who administers rough justice, often without reference to the law, has a certain appeal, if a slightly guilty one. Who has not at some time wished for a Jack Reacher to deal with villains, without recourse to the intricacies and expense of the legal system? Yet few of us would really want Reacher’s drifting existence, its lack of human warmth or commitment, and in most moods we value the civil society and the rule of law that regulate human interaction. This is the sort of book you might read on a long plane journey, or over a wet weekend. It is pure escapism, which is fun sometimes.

You can find out more about Lee Child and Jack Reacher here. Child’s most recent book is Worth Dying For (2010).