Reacher Said Nothing

by Andy Martin

  * * *

  Paper 12

  Lee Child Studies

  Answer three questions, one from each section

  Do not use the same material twice, either in this paper or in the examination as a whole. Irrelevant answers, or answers only tenuously related to the question, will be penalized. Illegible handwriting may place candidates at a disadvantage.

  Write your number, not your name, on the cover sheet of each Section booklet.

  Stationery requirements  Special requirements

  20-page Answer book x 1  None

  Rough work page

  You may not start to read the questions printed on the subsequent pages of this question paper until instructed you may do so by the proctor.

  SECTION A

  Discuss ONE of the following. Candidates must draw on the oeuvre of Lee Child in the context of other writers and forms of culture.

  1. “Literature does not exist. Or if it does, it’s a hoax or a delusion.”

  2. “Writing is insignificant in comparison with the voice.”

  3. “The history of Western literature is essentially a history of the knight errant.”

  4. EITHER: “Narrative provides human beings with a tool for survival—or a weapon.” OR: “All narrative is a sign of primordial failure and disappointment.”

  5. “Every book exists in order to be made into a film.”

  6. “The writer is a neurotic sociopath in need of psychoanalysis.”

  SECTION B

  Candidates should draw on ONE OR MORE texts by Lee Child.

  7. “Killing Floor is not just the first book by Lee Child, it provides the archetype of all his subsequent works.”

  8. “Reacher is a liberal humanist intellectual with arms the size of Popeye’s.”

  9. “Reacher does not simply eliminate ‘bad guys’: his mission is to eradicate the very possibility of narrative.”

  10. “Superficially logocentric, the classic Lee Child narrative is naturally self-deconstructing.”

  11. “In the work of Lee Child, discourse is invariably privileged over story and character.”

  12. “The Childean text is an exercise in the aesthetics of omission.”

  13. “I cannot understand the mentality of one who is awaiting the next Lee Child.”

  SECTION C

  Comment in detail on any TWO of the following extracts. You may answer on the extracts separately, or in the form of one continuous answer.

  (a)

  First thing out of the barrel of Reacher’s Barrett was a blast of hot gas. The powder in the cartridge exploded in a fraction of a millionth of a second and expanded to a superheated bubble. That bubble of gas hurled the bullet down the barrel and forced ahead of it and around it to explode out into the atmosphere. Most of it was smashed sideways by the muzzle brake in a perfectly balanced radial pattern, like a donut, so that the recoil moved the barrel straight back against Reacher’s shoulder without deflecting it either sideways up or down. Meanwhile, behind it, the bullet was starting to spin inside the barrel as the rifling grooves grabbed at it.

  Then the gas ahead of the bullet was heating the oxygen in the air to the point where the air caught fire. There was a brief flash of flame and the bullet burst out through the exact center of it, spearing through the burned air at nineteen hundred miles an hour. A thousandth of a second later, it was a yard away, followed by a cone of gunpowder particles and a puff of soot. Another thousandth of a second later, it was six feet away, and its sound was gravely chasing after it, three times slower.

  (DIE TRYING)

  (b)

  He had always been fit and strong, but the last three months had brought him to a new peak. He was six foot five, and he had weighed 220 when he left the Army. A month after joining the swimming pool gang, the work and the heat had burned him down to 210. Then the next two months, he had built back all the way to about 250, all of it pure hard muscle. His workload was prodigious. He figured to shift about four tons of earth and rock and sand every day. He had developed a technique of digging and scooping and twisting and throwing the dirt with his shovel so that every part of his body was working out all day long. The result was spectacular. He was burned a deep brown by the sun and he was in the best shape of his life. Like a condom crammed with walnuts, is what some girl had said.

  (TRIPWIRE)

  (c)

  No eyes, no interest.

  (MAKE ME)

  END OF PAPER

  REACHER IN TRANSLATION

  I WAS GOING TO do some serious research. Like a proper literary scholar (my day job, after all). Maybe it was something to do with the subzero temperature in New York.

  I was going to go back to his old school in England, I was going to track down some of his old schoolmates, the ones who used to call him “Grievous”; I was going to interview the current headmaster, maybe even speak to one or two of the teachers of the young James Grant—if there were any still left alive—and get their insights. And, finally—the pièce de résistance—I was going to retrieve some of Lee’s old school reports. I was going to be archaeologist rather than analyst for a change. I was sure it would be solid gold. I remember an examiner’s dismissive remark, for example, on the young Napoleon’s essay on happiness: “A most pronounced dream.” Which had tipped the balance in favor of becoming emperor rather than essayist. Imagine, then, if Lee’s old English teacher had scribbled some abusive remark on one of his great early works: “Not another four-word sentence! James needs to work harder and try his hand at five words or even six. And could he please stop all the scrapping in the schoolyard?” Or this, from one of the classmates: “Ah, Grievous—what a lad he was!” Or better still: “I hated the bastard!”

  “Nah,” Lee said, between spoonfuls of lobster bisque. “Fuck all that.”

  “It would be like a serious biography.”

  “Serious bollocks, you mean.”

  “It could be funny.”

  “Come on, who cares? It’s too Julian Barnes.”

  We were having lunch in Balthazar on Spring Street, the glowing French-style bistro that makes you feel like you’re on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, with a riot of red leather, giant mirrors,* and croissants. There was a new snowstorm forecast for the following day.

  Anyway, I tried. On the other hand, I did find out about the Latin translation.

  In a very small way, seen over a long period, the genre of Latin translations of popular books has been enjoying a surge. I once read (fragments of) Winnie ille Pu, for example. Alice Through the Looking-Glass was another modest hit (Aliciae Per Speculum Transitus). And, more recently, Harrius Potter. Meanwhile, there is a garden in Sussex bearing the legend of Reacher, Latinized. At least of a single recurrent phrase. A three-word sentence. And even that took the best part of a year to complete. The original line was, “Reacher said nothing.” But it turned out that Latin translators had rather a lot to say about it.

  This is where Lee’s old school—King Edward’s in Edgbaston, Birmingham—finally got into the story. A stonemason in Kent, who also happened to be a fan, offered to make Lee a sundial. Lee said okay. But what about the inscription? Of course, it would have to be in Latin. I know, says Lee, what about “Reacher said nothing”? That can’t be too hard to translate, can it? Reacher + dixit + nihil, not necessarily in that order. Or something like that. Just to be on the safe side, he consulted John Claughton, the new chief master at King Edward’s. He was a highly regarded classicist and still taught Greek and Latin. He had studied Greats at Oxford and played cricket for the university (he was a Blue). And he’d written a book about the Persian Wars. Surely he would know? Claughton was glad to be asked (having already tapped Lee for a few quid for the old alma mater) and had a pretty good idea of how to translate it, but, just to be on the safe side, decided to consult a couple of other Oxford Latinists and compare notes. They ended up kicking it around for an age, chewing over alternatives, turning it into a regular forum.

  The essential problem,
they all agreed, was Reacher. They dithered for months over the name alone. You can’t just leave it as “Reacher,” they argued (unlike Winnie ille Pu, for example). But the problem was that, in Latin, the verb can’t just morph seamlessly into a noun (to reach > Reacher). So they came up with “Extensor.” Which was cool insofar as it meant something to do with reaching and stretching and straining and aspiring. But apparently sometime in the Middle Ages, notably in connection with the Inquisition, it became associated with being stretched on the rack. So it became a synonym for sadism and torture. And therefore uncool, even for Reacher. They agreed instead on “Adeptus,” which had more positive connotations and originally meant not just skillful, having knowledge, but, more specifically, “one who has attained the art of transmuting metal into gold.”

  Then one of them had a notion that it had to be six syllables, as a kind of nod in the direction of the hexameter. It would sound more Latinate that way. So nihil had to be contracted to nil. Hence the final form of Reacher saying nothing, as inscribed on the sundial sitting in Lee Child’s back garden in Sussex, facing south:

  NIL DIXIT ADEPTUS

  As a tribute Lee gave the name Claughton to one of the more simple-minded country bumpkin bad guys in Never Go Back. The dreaded Claughton clan.

  “I love the intensity,” said Lee. “That real enthusiasts can spend so much time and energy and intellectual power and passion over something so seemingly trivial and pointless.”

  * * *

  * Exactly one week later, according to the New York Post, “A giant mirror crashed onto diners at the hip SoHo hotspot.”

  A THEORY OF EVERYTHING

  LEE CHILD SAID, “Reacher said nothing.” Lee Child doesn’t often say nothing himself.

  On this occasion he listened to me sketching out my own dark theory about why we write. Something to do with lack, failure, an evolutionary pathology, an asymmetry between being and doing, boredom and death. And then, just to wind him up, I mentioned that someone had said to me that the only way Lee could write was to have a “chip on his shoulder.” Reacher, in other words, was channeling the author’s own anger and bitterness and resentment. Or at best (going back to Virgil), furor. Which could be divine, depending on how you looked at it (Aeneas, for example, is frequently inspired by it).

  He nodded, patient, and gave the question careful thought. “Any sonofabitch that says I have a chip on my shoulder—he is a fuckin’ liar and I am going to hunt that bastard down and…”

  He cracked up, spluttering. He had me going for a moment. He probably scared the bejeezus out of the two women at the table next to us. He didn’t care either.

  “Never forgive, never forget,” I said, quoting Reacher.

  “It’s true that Reacher is vengeful. He bears grudges. I’m probably the same. But…” He smiled at the ladies. I think they were reassured. Charming psycho with a smile. “I don’t begin with the writer: I begin with the reader.”

  The waiter came up and poured us both some more coffee. I was having the roasted eggplant sandwich.

  “You have to ask yourself why it is people love the form of the story,” Lee continued. “Whether it’s Reacher, or Homer, or a thirty-second commercial on TV.”

  “Okay, why?”

  “You’re right about the failure thing,” he said. “We were basically crap as animals. We still are. Neanderthals were better than us. They were stronger, faster, better animals. More muscular, probably more virile. Then around two hundred thousand years ago, our brains got bigger and we got language. Maybe it was a random mutation or maybe the development of language increased the size of the brain. Of course plenty of other animals had language. Look at the prairie dog, for example. Their cries can distinguish between a ground-based predator and an air-based one.”

  “So what’s the difference?”

  “The difference is we had syntax. It permitted speculation. Hypotheticals. A bigger vocabulary put us right ahead of the game. Therefore we could plan and organize. Thirty or forty people together makes a powerful animal. The power of the mob. We were automatically on top of all the competition. Language was not harmless: we wiped out an entire species with it. But it was fact-based communication to begin with. All reportage. Stuff to do with woolly mammoths and saber-tooths.”

  “Variations on mimesis, then. Mirroring. The picture theory of language.”

  “Also comparing notes on killing techniques, I imagine,” said Lee. “But then, maybe a hundred thousand years later, we started talking about stuff that hadn’t happened. We were talking about people that didn’t exist. Parables, fairy tales, myths. It was a radical shift. A way of killing leisure time? Ha! There was no leisure.”

  I didn’t suggest the thing about leisure. He just came up with that himself. Maybe because it seemed like a bit of a put-down of the whole business. “It was a fundamental insight about cave painting too,” I said. “All those great animals—they weren’t saying: Here they are; they are good to eat; go and hunt them down! It was more: Look, they don’t exist anymore; this is what they used to look like; what have we done? It was an expression of regret or nostalgia for everything that had been lost.”

  Lee was impatient with my dark view of everything. O dark dark dark, they all go into the dark. The bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang kind of line. He was much more upbeat. “Nothing happened, nothing advanced, unless it was helpful to our survival. The stories were either consoling or encouraging. The heroic story would inspire you to be heroic. If you’re in a cave with a whole bunch of other people inside, some of them injured or sick with howling predators outside baying for your blood, and someone tells you a story about the guy who got away from the saber-tooth, how you’re not going to lose every time, it gave people fortitude, the courage to endure. The guy who turns around and kills the saber-tooth: it makes people feel stronger. So the story must have given people a boost, a psychological edge, a small evolutionary advantage. We must have adapted to be good listeners. We self-selected for those who respond to stories.”

  I liked Lee’s theory. Hope of a hero coming to save you. Hope of becoming a hero. It would explain why the Reacher stories were so popular. I was more accustomed to French narratives about sorrowful losers who developed some kind of self-justifying philosophical twist to keep them going. But I guess it was similar. “There’s only one problem with your theory,” I said. “Obviously if there were truth conditions, then there were untruth conditions too. The possibility of deception had to be there from the very beginning.” I was far more noir than Lee Child. Everyone was always already a liar, potentially. Cain not Abel.

  “But why would you want to tell someone there’s a woolly mammoth on the other side of the hill if there isn’t one?”

  “So you can kill them,” I said. “Creep up behind them with a rock in your hand while they’re looking for the woolly mammoth. Or send them into a trap.”

  “The lie.” Lee looked thoughtful.

  “The con.”

  “Is that me?”

  “Is it?”

  “I think I will have that refill after all,” he said to the waiter, tapping the empty mug.

  “You don’t need language to lie,” I said. “Sartre says that the garçon in the Café de Flore is faking it—pretending to be a waiter.” The waiter had shoved off again by then, but still I kept my voice down. “This whole restaurant is pretending to be a French restaurant. In the middle of Manhattan.”

  “The whole of Las Vegas is like that,” said Lee.

  “Las Vegas—the fields, the meadows…”

  “It’s like you’re always somewhere else—Italy or Egypt or wherever. Never Las Vegas.”

  “And stories are like that too?”

  “Look, if you see a beautiful woman in here…” I looked around. There was no “if” about it. Balthazar was stacked with beautiful women. “You’re not going to fly off to the Caribbean and have sex with her all weekend, are you? Well, in a story you can.”

  I was remind
ed that Lee was just about to hop on a plane to Bermuda, with his wife. For a week. They were fleeing the New York winter. “Or maybe if you just write the story?”

  Which definitely did something to the old chip on his shoulder. “Or, say your brother-in-law is pissing you off.”

  “Do you have a brother-in-law?”

  “Okay the bank manager, then. Or a traffic cop. You want to smash them right in the face. You can’t, can you? Well, in a story you can. Or someone can. Reacher can. You get your revenge vicariously. You can live another life. An imaginary life.”

  He was rushing to get out the door to light up. Sticking to his resolution after all. I hardly had time to get on my ten layers, two hats, and a double scarf. As he headed off to the subway on Sixth, and thence to the airport and Bermuda, I called out to him, “Hey, don’t forget to write!”

  MORPHEUS

  LEE CHILD WAS BEING HUNTED. He was the quarry, the prey. Everyone was after him, at different times, like paparazzi, like Furies, like hungry wolves. Someone, anyone, party or parties unknown. His bank manager for one. His publishers, his editors. A lot of readers, especially after the mass revolt against casting Tom Cruise as Reacher. Tom Cruise. Me. And Lee Child was running away, as fast as he could go.

  Every now and then he would hop in a car, or a train, or a plane. It didn’t help. His pursuers were relentless, they would never give up. If one of them dropped out there was always someone else bringing up the rear. Whereas Lee was on his own. He was all alone and he always would be. No one was helping him. Sometimes they had dogs, bloodhounds, or great salivating bloodthirsty rottweilers, packs of them, all with the scent of Lee Child up their noses.