Over Reachering

For a short while, I read Reacher books and nothing but Reacher books1. They’re the kind of book you can read that way. There’s not a lot to digest, but you always find you want a little more.

Reacher, if you don’t know of him, is a character dreamed up by Lee Child. Child was tall as a youngster and frequently asked to get things down from high shelves for shorter people. Reacher is kind of like that, but instead of using his height to get things down from high shelves, he uses it to mete out a kind of frontier justice to those who can’t get it for themselves. He’s not only tall though: he weighs 250 lbs and as an ex-major2 in the Military Police, he’s trained to track down and hurt people who are themselves trained to track down and hurt people.

The Reacher brand of justice is delivered in a somewhat haphazard fashion as he hitchhikes and buses across the US carrying nothing but a toothbrush3 and (variously) an expired passport, a debit card, an old war medal, and probably some loose change. Rather than wash his clothes, he buys them from thrift stores as and when the old ones get too stinky. The stinkiness is never mentioned directly, though other characters allude to it. They never mention the sartorial choices that are likely to be forced upon someone who is 6ft 5in tall, built like the proverbial brick outhouse and chooses exclusively to shop second hand. But I digress…

The typical story has Reacher roll into an unsuspecting town-with-a-secret. It’s the kind of town you get in America somewhere out in those large spaces between the big cities. After being in town for a few minutes, Reacher trips over “the secret” and from thereon in, he uses his Holmesian powers of deduction and fearsome capacity for violence to deliver… justice? Well, no, not justice exactly. Nor does he right wrongs, he mostly just multiplies them, racking up a triple-digit body count over the course of the 25 or so books4. He does kill a lot of bad guys, but without ever dwelling for too long on what exactly badness means5. He’s Dexter6 but without the self awareness. Robin Hood with an army pension.

Whatever it is he does, he’s usually doing it for the regular folks who can’t do it for themselves. The bad guys are sometimes mobsters, sometimes drug dealers, but other times they’re corrupt politicians and cops, or larger more impersonal forces given specific human form – foreclosing banks, job flight, FDA-approved drug addiction, the psychological and physical problems suffered by veterans, that kind of thing. Reacher is effective as a character because he is someone who has the wherewithal to stand up to these things and punch them all to death. Speaking of the war on terror, Terry Jones memorably asked whether you can wage war on an abstract noun. If anyone can, Reacher can7.

Malcom Gladwell writing in the New Yorker contrasts Reacher with the nameless Western hero who rides into town and cleans the place up. While the Western hero brought law to the lawless, Gladwell claims, Reacher brings lawlessness to a world that has too much of it. This seems (to me) almost completely wrong8. Reacher inhabits a world in which the institutions that are supposed to protect people have completely failed (except perhaps for one good cop). In a town where the police chief is in cahoots with the local criminals, Reacher, by hospitalising all the local criminals and then punching the police chief to death, achieves what the institutions have somehow failed to. When the mayor sends a gang of leering henchmen to teach Reacher a lesson, we know that it’s they who will learn the lesson and we cheer it on because we want to see the smirking bullies lose.

The problem is that the bullies are just losing to a bigger bully. The only reason we keep rooting for Reacher is that he has a clear moral compass and, because this is fiction of a certain type, we can be pretty sure it will never swerve away from true north9. Even so, the premise only really works if we don’t think too hard about it. Once Reacher has done punching and shooting all the bad guys and setting fire to the local factory (and main employer), he wanders out of town to thumb a lift, leaving whatever chaos he has caused behind him – now without a functioning police department or civic authority to deal with it – and heads for the next stop on his aimless but fatal itinerary. Does he make things better? We never find out, but he does make us feel good momentarily.

It’s best not to think about it too hard10.

-fin-

1. I was in an airport book store somewhere in the southern US. I was looking for something to read between cancelled flights. An old guy in a cap and oil-stained dungarees, with skin that had spent most of its sixty or so years outside gently toasting in the southern sun, took down a book from the shelf. I always like to know what other people are reading, so I looked over and saw “Lee Child” on the cover in large letters. I also recognised the title. I made eye contact and smiled broadly. “That’s a good one” I said. He took one look at me, stuffed the book back onto the shelf upside down and ran away. ↩︎
2. I’m a bit hazy on military ranks. He could be a major or a captain or a lance pedestal or something else entirely. ↩︎
3. I always wonder, why a toothbrush? His accoutrements are stripped down to almost nothing, so Reacher is little more than his name and his history. Or rather, a past. Reacher’s life doesn’t accumulate. He was in the military and after that, for an unspecified period of time, he hasn’t been. Few of the books refer to each other, though sometimes the bus he gets on at the end of one, is the bus he gets off at the start of another. His memory, which at times is eidetic, retains and regurgitates endless points of trivia, but after leaving the military police seems to have stored nothing about his own personal history of extraordinary violence. The toothbrush thing though, of this we have no clues. ↩︎
4. A handful of short stories, two movies and three seasons of TV. ↩︎
5. He does, occasionally say in his defence that it was self-defence. Whether this would hold water in a court of law is another matter. ↩︎
6. Dexter, if you don’t know*, is a serial killer who kills other serial killers, this having been deemed a suitable outlet for his proclivities by his father, a veteran cop who taught the young Dexter everything he knows about hiding his trail. Dexter also works for Miami’s police department as a forensic expert. The TV series started off as darkly funny, but quickly lost all confidence in its audience’s intelligence. Anyway, there’s not a lot of mileage in a sociopathic character** as a vehicle for the audience’s sympathy. The only pathy there to symp with is socio and hence any emp is wasted. All the socially acceptable pathies are embodied as secondary characters; his sister (also a police officer) is by far the best thing in it. ↩︎
7. Of course, he can’t but the hard work of replacing the systemic inequities would take a different kind of deathly dull hero, or even thousands of them. ↩︎
8. It is Gladwell after all, so the first question we should ask isn’t “Is he wrong?” but “How wrong is he exactly?”. ↩︎
9. Is Reacher a reliable narrator? It’s not a question that has much mileage. When he’s not thinking about which motel a runaway solider might have run to, his internal monologue is grindingly dull with just the slightest hint of pretension. ↩︎
10. Just to say, any country where a popular fantasy involves unrestrained violence as a means of achieving a moment of local justice is not in a happy place. ↩︎

* And what have you been doing with your time?

** which doesn’t stop people from trying.