by Andy Martin
I had been reading an essay on the history of Mesopotamian agriculture. By an archaeologist.* He distinguished between “archival” and “sacrificial” societies. The archival guys started keeping records, mainly about how many bags of grain they had or could sell. It was the origin of paperwork, albeit on tablets, in cuneiform (and the grain even gets into the Rosetta Stone, for example, along with gold, silver, high priests, and manifest gods). The sacrificial guys put the emphasis on warrior types to defend them in conflict. The whole point was to produce a better (bigger, braver, more lethal) warrior, equipped with a lot of metal, some of which would be buried with him. But naturally there was a convergence between the two. The archivists needed warriors so nobody would steal their grain and the sacrificers needed archives to record all their great sacrifices (from the Latin, “to make sacred”). The very possibility of there being an archive tended to ramp up the warrior side of things. The archive came up with the idea of the hero. Hence, in some sense, agriculture produces heroes. Farmers and Reacher-types were inherently linked (think, for example, of Clint Eastwood in assorted spaghetti westerns coming to the aid of farming folk; or Shane; or the Lone Ranger). No archive, no hero.
But here was the irony. The archive set them up in some kind of rivalry or conflict or agon. Farmers basically hated heroes and vice versa, according to the archive. The opposition was all over Rousseau, for example. The noble savage, living in the state of nature (Jean-JACK Rousseau), versus the decadent civilization of the city and the theater and the arts and sciences. And this was the other irony. The archive—the stela or text that would ultimately morph into the novel—was fundamentally nostalgic. It looked back to the state of nature as a golden age, before everything got screwed up. And guess what screwed it all up in the first place? Yep—farmers, agriculture, and therefore the archive. Thus the book, any book, is neurotically riven, constantly driven to deny what it is (the product of the shift towards agriculture and industry) and harking back mistily in the direction of a pre-agricultural, pre-industrial, pre-literary paradise (with sex dangling tantalizingly in front of your eyes, moreover).
The archive rehearsed its own birth, in a mood of elegy, in the shift from the nomadic hunter-gatherer phase of human existence to the settled, agricultural phase, tilling the earth rather than running around all over it, killing anything that looked edible. It was already right there in the Book of Genesis. The regret, the loss, the recollection of a sublime state of being. And the fall. “Cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread…” Doesn’t sound like much fun, does it? The times we used to have BEFORE all this farming lark!
Thus, Lee. He would hate farmers, it was built into the great tradition of writing that grew out of…farming. He was a farmer who had to deny that he was a farmer.
“It also explains why you hate bureaucrats.” I had just about finished spouting my latest theory.
“Do I hate bureaucrats?”
“It’s right there in The Enemy. Reacher kills the bureaucrat at the end. The Big Shot who doesn’t himself kill anyone but sponsors a lot of killing. Reacher pulls out a gun and says it’s okay I’m not going to shoot you. The guy breathes a sigh of relief. And then Reacher says, ‘I was just kidding,’ and shoots him in the head.”
Lee chuckled at the memory. “Yeah, I really enjoyed writing that scene.”
“You, the glorified pen-pusher, have to kill the pen-pusher. And it probably explains why you’re ‘goofing off’ all the time. You can’t afford to be too disciplined. Too much like some kind of bureaucrat.”
Lee gave the theory serious consideration. “I only hate the bad bureaucrats. The incompetent and corrupt ones. The cowardly bureaucrat. Not all of them.” He had a theory—a sort of revised Rousseau, latter-day Book of Genesis golden-age thinking—that British civil servants used to be fair-minded intellectuals. Spreading the great British Empire far and wide, administering India, that sort of thing. But that they went into a massive decline in the 1970s, and especially under cost-cutting Thatcher. Which is what led Lee into his life of crime. Or rather the denial of crime. In a spirit of preserving justice. I had almost forgotten: his original specialization was not writing, and not television either, but law. And therefore lawlessness.
Back in England he was always picking up tickets, for parking illegally, or speeding. And he would never pay the fine. Not once. “I approach it from a civil liberties perspective. If you ever let the mere accusation of crime become synonymous with a conviction, you have East Germany and a totalitarian state. Everybody is automatically guilty.”
“Yeah, but you were actually guilty, right?”
“Of course,” he snorted. “Probably everyone really is guilty of something, let’s face it. But that’s not the point. You have to test and challenge the prosecutors. Citizens should put them through their paces. It’s a fundamental principle of jurisprudence.”
So whenever he picked up a ticket he would just ignore it. Rip it up and toss it. Then the follow-up letters started arriving. And he would ignore them too, rip them up into tiny little pieces in a spirit of high jurisprudence. Once in a while he would actually get dragged into court. And the formal charge was not the parking infraction, but not responding to an official letter. Lee Child, how do you plead? Not guilty, Your Honor!
His basic strategy can be summed up in two words: WHAT LETTER? “I would make them walk through it in a forensically responsible way. You know, who wrote this letter? Do you have any proof it was actually delivered? No? Your Honor, I beg to have this case dismissed. For want of evidence.” He pulled it off six or seven times in Manchester. It was always thrown out for lack of hard evidence.
Lee went out into the kitchen and poured two cups of coffee and brought them back in. “After that I decided to up the ante a little. I started appealing for expenses. You know, a day off work: £300. On account of having my time wasted by a frivolous, vexatious prosecution. And I won too. Which really wound up this woman who was running the whole ticket-issuing business.”
Her name was Ms. Bracegirdle. The next time “Mr. James Grant” was brought before the bench, she brought her entire office staff along with her. Reinforcements. To demonstrate the existence of the letter and make the charge stick. Lee had to cross-examine the typist who had typed the original letter accusing him of speeding. And who had been coached in what to say.
LEE: You can recall writing this letter?
SHE: Yes. On May 5.
LEE: Even though this was over a year ago.
SHE: I recall it clearly.
LEE: So you will remember what day of the week it was.
SHE: How do you expect me to remember that?—this was over a year ago! Oops…
Case dismissed! [Sound of gavel being brought down]
“It’s the duty of the citizen to stand up to the state,” said Lee, rather heroically. The same applied in the United States. Where, of course, he had been caught speeding. They didn’t know who they were up against. In the U.S. the traffic cop has to make out an affidavit, a report about exactly what took place. “If you ask for the paperwork, it’s invariably got a mistake in it. This is my point about bad bureaucrats. They can’t get anything right. And they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with a faulty affidavit.”
Cut to: Lee Child versus the United States or at least the State of New York. There are a load of other people outside the courtroom, all plea-bargaining. “You were doing fifty-one. Will you plead to forty-eight?” That sort of thing. A lesser penalty. A cop comes up to Lee.
COP: You were doing well over fifty, more like sixty. Will you plead forty-five?
LEE: I want dismissal.
COP: Come on, be reasonable. How about thirty-five? Will you plead to that?
LEE: Dismissal.
COP: What about not wearing a seatbelt?
They thought he was bluffing.
They were right, he was bluffing, but he would bluff all the way and never give up. Especially when he had an ace up his sleeve. They go into court. Lee is standing in the dock. “Not guilty!” His invariable plea. The cop can’t believe it. But we’ve got this dufus! He is so guilty. He’s never going to wriggle out of this one. The cop goes up to Lee in the dock. “What do you think you’re doing?” he whispers to him. Lee shows him the affidavit, drawing attention to the “Infiniti” in the first paragraph (which he really was driving) and the “Saab” in the second paragraph (the product, no doubt, of cutting and pasting some prior template). The cop raises his eyes to heaven. Like a helpful go-between he goes back to the judge and mutters something to him. The judge, wasting no further time, bangs his gavel. “Case dismissed!” Again.
“It’s partly fun and mischief,” said Lee. “But it’s part serious. They’ve got to do the job properly. It’s trivial, but it’s the visible end of the spectrum. If we allow an accusation to stand as a conviction, unchallenged, then…”
“You should have been a lawyer.”
Lee allowed he had had a legal education, which caused him to ask of all office-holders, “What is your jurisdiction?” Flying back to London one time, he had reached passport control and showed his passport to the inspector.
SHE: Where have you been?
LEE: None of your business.
He had the right to go more or less anywhere he pleased, without interrogation. And bureaucrats had to be taught not to overstep the boundaries of their authority. “I wouldn’t do it here!” (landing at JFK), he added. Mainly on account of not being a citizen.
“One day I’d like to try not presenting my passport, just to see what happens.” He was talking about returning to the U.K. again. “In terms of sheer jurisprudence, they shouldn’t need to see it. You’re either a citizen or you’re not.”
He thought the passport was a mere symbol or token that you should be able to do without. But Lee also wanted to push his luck to the limit. Just to see when it would run out. “One of these days they’re going to nail my ass.”
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* David Wengrow, “ ‘Archival’ and ‘Sacrificial’ Economies in Bronze Age Eurasia: An Interactionist Approach to the Hoarding of Metals,” Interweaving Worlds: Systemic Interactions in Eurasia, 7th to the 1st Millennia BC, edited by Toby C. Wilkinson, Susan Sherratt, and John Bennet (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2011).
SHANE: A FOOTNOTE
LEE HAD WRITTEN an introduction to a new edition of Jack Schaefer’s Shane. He kind of had to. So many people went around comparing Reacher to Shane. And quoting the kid’s line at the end, “Shane! Shane! Come back, Shane!” Which is only in the movie, not the book. Come back, Alan Ladd! It was just about as annoying as the allusions to Tom Cruise.
Lee had to have a comeback.
It was a great book and it wasn’t. Lee was clinical in his analysis. He pointed out that Schaefer had never been farther west than Cleveland, Ohio, where he was born. If you had a map of America a foot and a half wide unfolded in front of you, then Cleveland would be less than three inches in from the right. A long way from Wyoming, where there was the classic encounter between homesteaders and ranchers, mediated and resolved by the mysterious stranger, Shane. It was on a par, Lee suggested, with writing about William Wallace and the highlands of Scotland when you had never been further north than Luton. And Schaefer knew nothing about fighting either. All his fights, “right down to the balsawood chairs and the spun-sugar glass,” were based on radically misleading Hollywood movies. Lee laughed at the quote on the cover of his old coffee-stained copy: “If you’re only going to read one western in your life, read this one.”
“Don’t,” he said.
And yet this short first-person narrative (seen from the point of view of the boy throughout) retained its grand mythic status. Lee’s concept of the eight-hundred-year-old “knight errant” was too recent for me. This narrative was fully Mesopotamian in outlook, pre-feudal, going all the way back to Gilgamesh. It restaged the clash between the archival and the sacrificial societies. It nostalgically summoned up the ghost of the old nomadic hunter-gatherer, who was Shane, who had been Enkidu and Theseus, who would become Reacher.
But when we were talking about it, Lee pointed out something else Shane had, or rather didn’t have, which made it into the great work of art it was. An information deficit. Realist fiction tended to be bureaucratic: it filled in all the forms, checked the boxes about identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, chronology, etc. Some writers like to deploy spreadsheets and graphs. They over-explain. Lee, in contrast, preferred to “under-explain.” It was like the “Devil’s Bridge”—when you lacked a fully articulated historical narrative, then myth took over.
What Lee really appreciated about Schaefer’s story was everything he hadn’t written rather than what actually made it onto the page. His aesthetics of omission. Shane was a mysterious stranger with no past and no future. Reacher, it was true, was a little like that, even though Lee had been forced to fill in a few of the gaps along the way. But at some level, nobody could really know anything about Reacher. He was a blank. A very large blank. “What I’m doing,” Lee explained, “is artificially managing information scarcity.”
This is what both Jack Schaefer and Lee Child were good at: all the stuff they left out. And this is the natural habitat of myth—not Mount Olympus or the Black Forest, but the voids, the dark interstellar spaces, and the undiscovered country.
THE THAW
HE WAS MAKING TOAST. This was about as far as his cooking skills went. Even the toast was a bit overdone. His toast was as black as his coffee. But I didn’t mind black.
The Independent (London) had published an article about Lee and Reacher in the New Year, one I’d written. Apparently it had swung some people around. The paranoid ones who basically agreed with Bourbon John that I was killing Reacher. Now even they were saying maybe it couldn’t do any harm. Perhaps (looked at from a brazenly commercial point of view, rather than the scientific-aesthetic one I preferred to adopt) it could even be a positive for the brand.
“Unless,” said Lee, “you come to the conclusion, at the end of all your pondering and analysis, that it’s all complete shit.”
“I don’t want to anticipate my conclusions,” I said. Man in white coat. “That would be premature.”
“Oh well, you know what they say—so long as you spell the name right, it’s cool.”
There was a paradox about the Reacher novels. They were immensely popular, published in their millions around the world, with a fan roster that included Antonia Fraser, Malcolm Gladwell, Kate Atkinson, and Haruki Murakami. They were also immensely unpopular among certain readers of Julian Barnes and Jonathan Franzen, frowned upon by Harold Pinter, eliciting frosty nose-wrinkling from such as Edward Docx. Now, I had the impression, maybe there was a faint thaw setting in. For example, a Cambridge postgrad, trying to set up some interdisciplinary seminar series on work-in-progress, had wondered aloud if Lee and I could be interested in participating.*
“Reacher remains a little outside the pale,” Lee said. “There are barriers. You can see it from their point of view. They need an exclusion principle. I’m too low-falutin for them.” It was an axis that stretched, as Lee put it, from the Radio Times to The Sunday Times. Colin Dexter and Morse had broken through (thanks to Oxford and the opera); then, when he stopped writing, it was Ian Rankin and Rebus. They were the anointed ones, the axis had permission to read them. Reacher remained a guilty pleasure—something you only indulged in behind closed doors. When Reacher came up on some literary panel show on Radio 2 (BBC London), one of the “artsy women panelists” introduced her comments by saying, “I would never have thought of picking up this book if not for the show…” It was sheer naked prejudice, but to her surprise she liked it.
“I’m like one of those obscure 60s bands,” said Lee. “You know, some kind of import, someone’s brother has the only album in the country. It still feels like that.”
>
“You’re probably never going to crowd-surf. Or fill the O2 Arena.” Lee had this fantasy of being a rock star, even though he couldn’t play a note.
“I guess it goes to the secret personal business of reading. You’re on your own, you’re not grooving with the masses. There really are sound waves on the air. Whereas reading—it’s weird. There’s just these tiny little squiggles on the page. The reader’s imagination is humming all the time. In music, you’re consuming without creating. It’s the hysteria of crowds. Euphoric. When you’re reading, you’re really creating the text as you go along. It’s just you and Reacher.”
Or maybe it was a bit like being a member of a club. A week or two earlier I had met Steven Poole, the Guardian columnist. He had written a funny pastiche of the Lee Child style in his review of Personal. But he was still a fan. Even amid a crowded table in a café in Shoreditch, London, we were soon down to comparing notes, like some kind of secret handshake.
ME: Do you remember the fight to the death with Paulie? The guy who is bigger than Reacher? [Persuader]
HE: Never should have tried the flying karate kick.
ME: “He got fancy, and I saw I was going to win after all.”
HE: Yeah. Never get fancy.
Maybe it was time to convene that Lee Child seminar after all.
* * *
* Credit to David Winters. A conference, “Books in the Making,” will take place in April 2016, in Cambridge, England, courtesy of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities.
ONLY A MATTER OF TIME
ENGLISH TRIPOS Part II [specimen paper]
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Date: Thursday, June 4, 2020
Time: 1:30 to 4:30