Summer Love
Jack Reacher in Exit Strategy
The bullshit meter is analogue1.
In 100 years, Jack Reacher will be better known by the TV series than the books, if at all. So will the characters from Slow Horses. It remains to be seen if that will be the case with William Gibson’s Neuromancer, a series which will inevitably enter a space already crowded with images Gibson helped dream up, beginning maybe with Fritz Lang, running through Alfred Bester, Frederik Pohl, Leigh Brackett, John Brunner, and Samuel Delany.
(Or, in 100 years, we’ll be up to the 129th Jack Reacher book and this will involve a mad scene we ourselves will sing his domestic detail as currently most of us can only achieve in dreams unaided by anything but open source gene and engram2 download.) (There, you know my dreams now.)
Jack Reacher is a superhero gig in the form of a crime novel, as were so many of the “classic” science fiction novels and comics, and it’s designed as such by British writer Lee Child3 with gritty British dramas on his CV. He has made it a more American franchise than most US pulp, thinning the nihilism and social observation of Jim Thompson and James M Cain with its distance from actual American life, and with quirks lifting Reacher out of all humanity. Reacher is not the kind of guy who will make good conversation at a barbecue about Elizabeth Strout or growing heritage pears and the recent TV series attempting to put a bit of this into him reduces his potency. He is not human. Even if it’s possible he is capable of sex we don’t need to see the gods at it. And joshing with the boys? Get over it committee TV writers with your backstories and arcs.
Besides Reacher’s giganticality and fightiness4, there’s Reacher’s sharp facts and facilities with numbers and his perfect mind Bulova, good to a depth of twelve inches. Reacher’s playback within his colossal head of classic blues—it’s unclear if he extends to JS Bach or Kraftwerk because his tastes appear entirely parochial, another non-human trait because who doesn’t like ABBA even if they hated it at the time—although he doesn’t have a photographic memory.
That’d be conceited.
Reacher sleeps on command, anywhere, a notion I thought I first encountered in Robert Heinlein or Popular Mechanics, but which may derive from a 1981 book by a sprint coach and of course crowds out genuine medical advice on sleeping now, on sites like Popular Mechanics. (Interestingly, a lack or fear of sleep features in Hemingway’s manly templates.) Most importantly, Reacher is a caffeine-and-beef-and-pancake-powered analogue observation and logic machine. (Almost but not steampunk where you shovel in pie and pistons punch the bad guys.) This is most apparent when he’s fighting in the service of the downtrodden and hijacked. Occasionally that’s Reacher himself, but usually it’s those who have run afoul of Bad People.
And earned Reacher’s assistance.
Reacher is not simply quirky, though you can tell he springs from the forehead of a genuine and even deep love of the US, its laconic cops, Western myths of the lawless (or law-free), and truly awful coffee. He’s deadpan neurodivergent. More. With a Saint Anthony (Padua5[iv])-like abandonment of home and possessions, also written law and order. In this, Reacher is a creature of personal love. Such purity means that if you gain his trust, you gain the bloody blessing of a higher power.
In Exit Strategy, only the 29th rinse and repeat, Reacher’s described as having no state between torpor and violent action. He’s also described as angry. Harm to the innocent is all that makes him angry. Nothing else. He’s a walking beatitude. Even this, because organisations cannot be pure, he prioritises to what he can remedy within his reach, as it were.
A longer reach than most. Literally and plot-wise. Reacher’s been known to take down whole international organisations with their deep government connections. Though the odds are stacked, he’s a superhero, so his calculations work. They are the kind of calculations those who love to bag weather services with their doctorates and supercomputers and caution and probabilities would like to get right themselves. Instinctively. In Exit Strategy, Reacher’s never pushed6; there’s merely a great deal of detail in the methodical overcoming of difficulty. He just applies himself.
All using folk physics plus the clear reasoning of the non-materialist yet unspiritual outsider and an untrained-by-anything-but-walking mighty unsaintly bod. In this respect he’s 40s Batman with a toothbrush. But Reacher has been better thought-through as he’s hitched the roads over three decades, published on the same date. His targets are pure.
In other hands he might form argument for vigilante sovereign citizens. And it’s true that if everyone behaved like the former Military Police investigator, we’d be in worse kaka. But everybody isn’t like Reacher. A little of his ability is (military) education; mostly it’s how he is, always will be.7
And yet Reacher does not read. Has not read. (OK, case files.) He knows an awful lot for somebody with his minimal habits and lifestyle. My mind rushes in to fill the gap, the way we do in order not to be degrading and insulting ourselves by just running our eyes over such unlikely events, with a theory derived from my typically disordered reading of Piaget and the like in researching AI development: Reacher has an intuitive grounding in disciplines. Take for example folk psychology, which might also be called “no bullshit I know how people think” and which in the wrong hands results in the pub boor, but in the hand of a Brit who doesn’t need to see the Private Investigator as an investigator, or even human, this is Reacher’s greatest superpower, despite the fact that Reacher’s skill is a product of my own imagination. He knows quite enough thank you.
That said, Exit Strategy distinguishes between the exceptionalism of the impatient and powerful, and the well-disciplined and thoughtful. The MacGuffin—chip, formula, code, weapon—here is a person, eyewitness and expert persuaded to affirm to US officials they need to urgently intercept WMDs.
Evil here arrives as private military gaining from US conflict. (With lair like a psychopathic fun park offering us a tricky architectural climax.) Although he doesn’t approve of outsourcing force—apart from his own—Reacher is singularly unconcerned by it until the MacGuffin lands at his feet in the course of another investigation, conducted for imperfect-but-innocent victims. Then he proceeds to take down an entire army and restore things to SNAFU.
I read Reacher as it comes out, summertimes in Australia. From my local library. While the Childs are more cautious with Jack Reacher under brother Andrew Grant’s fingertips, the same delight in research of US locations and detail shows, and the same precise workings—fight sequences, beak-ins, and criminal plots—go off like clockwork. This is of course also the true source of Reacher’s intuitive superpowers of maths, stochastic analysis, ethics, psychology, and physics, because the novels can’t take a year to draft. (I put my fingers in my ears and la-la at this thought.) Reacher’s even able to exploit technology beyond Glock 17 level, collaborating with smart phone owners able who swipe and pinch to his instructions. Reacher knows what this tech can do, just doesn’t use it for—er, folk aesthetic reasons?
Jack Reacher is deliberately Paul Bunyan with a side of Woody Guthrie. He doesn’t require the tough voice used in his audiobooks; I prefer the one inside my head, more holy Alan Ladd than a gruff Adam West. (The female voices also sound like a manly man pretending, no uncanny intuitive accuracy there.) And yet his foreign-brewed, sugar-powered8 US exceptionalism barrels on successfully down the road leaving contrail-like dust. I’ve seen it argued that there’s a takeover of roles in US films by Brits, and this ability to not get down into the long grass of genuine portrayal may be a secret of their success. It’s the myth decadent, which we see in the cynical architecture of the Whitehouse East Wing, which scrapes history and tradition because in the marketing mind, to most people the real thing is a bit challenging, so better a salty fake thing that can be sold as real.
Real people, if they still read, may disagree.
I know, I’ve written about Reacher before, but this is the last time, I promise.
See Alan Garner for engrams!
Now with Andrew Child (IRL Jim Grant and Andrew Grant)
Technical wrestling terms
My favourite is Anthony Mary Claret, who predicted the “scourge” of Communism.
OK, he has been pushed before.
I mean, there is an origin story in “Second Son” and elsewhere but he’s kind of born into himself.