by Andy Martin
I’ve gone on about how metaphoric the Child text can be (with its network of symbols and echoes). But it is also quintessentially metonymic. Every cause has its effect, every action its inevitable reaction: the house has become a mini–Newtonian universe. An immense piece of clockwork in which all the cogs and the gears are grinding away in harmony (e.g., “Reacher eased the trigger home, and he felt the mechanism turn, gears and cams and levers, effortless…”). A mechanism, a solar system with all the planets orbiting according to their iron laws.
“We are all competing with one another. Filmmakers and writers. So naturally you have to see the bullet and its whole trajectory (‘exploding a pile of wedding presents on the table in the yard outside, in a cloud of paper fragments, white and silver, like confetti a few days early’). It’s slowed right down and examined, analyzed. I love doing that. It’s video porn in a way.”
He was saying how he needed meticulous detail. “Wet slap!” he said vehemently. “Isn’t that great? I love the onomatopoeia of that.” (“Twenty feet behind the guy’s head the wall instantly cratered, the size of a punch bowl, and a ghastly split second after that the contents of the guy’s brain pan arrived to fill it, with a wet slap…”)
“Maybe it’s the plosives,” I said. “Sound effects.”
“It’s third-person, but it’s very tight to Reacher. The rambling stream-of-consciousness—it’s almost more intimate than the first-person narration. Reacher has already shot two people. But there is a third. He has to swing his weapon around but the other guy is simultaneously bringing his weapon to bear on Reacher. It’s a slow-motion race.”
“Like Killing Floor?”
“I love doing that. Again it’s cinematic. He’s moving the gun, feeling the levers. It’s been relatively unlyrical. But still flowing. I wanted to pull it back to Reacher brutalism. Like this. A red chunk came out of his neck.”
“That is fairly blunt.”
“He doesn’t have to be precise at this point. All he cares about is whether the guy is dead or not. I loved that passage in Personal where she says, ‘Reacher! He’s not breathing!’ and he replies, ‘What am I? A doctor?’ ”
Lee was pleased with the way the scene was developing. “It’s a nice sequence this. People are going to like some of this. It’s picturesque.”
“And the shooting in the face. Is that like a close-up?”
“Better to shoot someone in the face. It’s more cinematic. And Reacher is annoyed. So is the reader by then. The reader wants to see the guy’s individuality eradicated. Hence the face.”
But he was thinking all the time, making micro judgment calls, about what to put in and what to leave out. “You don’t want to be lazy. But you don’t want to be laborious either. I don’t want it to be like one of those old ballroom dancing charts—you know where you lay out the steps in front of you on the floor. One foot here, another foot there.”
There was a great passage about Reacher having the gun in his hand, with some quasi-erotic talk of him grasping the butt: “He snugged the butt in his palm, solid and reassuring, and he fit his finger in the guard, against the trigger, hard and substantial, and he brought the gun up.” I had to ask about the research. “Are you actually going about firing guns to see what it feels like? Do you have to go to the gun range?”
“The thing about the gun…you don’t really need to have the gun in your hand. It’s better because you’re forced to imagine. If you go to the gun range and shoot, it’s a lose-lose situation. It’s either exactly what you thought to begin with and you’ve wasted your time…”
“Or?”
“Or it’s different—and then you want to say, hey this is so different to what you think. And then you become a boring and proselytizing writer who likes to say how different everything is in reality to what you thought it was.”
I mentioned Correna going to the cemetery in search of inspiration. He had some firm advice: “Don’t go to the cemetery: imagine the cemetery—and then see what happens. We already know what the spooky cemetery feels like. We have a common collective pool of knowledge. The thing is, you don’t want to step too far outside the consensus. You need to deepen it maybe.”
Lee, like Roland Barthes, thought we were all governed by the doxa, the “cultural code.” We talked about the difference between, in Bertrand Russell’s formulation, “knowledge by description” (say, Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, a case in point of the doxa at work) and “knowledge by experience” (actually going to one particular cemetery, reading the inscriptions on the gravestones).
“It doesn’t matter if you copy a movie—they copy us. You’re not in search of the ineffable. Knowledge by experience sounds plausible enough. But…I was talking to a writer about her scene where she’d discovered a body underwater. In order to write that scene she had actually taken up scuba diving. To give it more authenticity. Which sounds reasonable. But then I pick up her next book and there on the first page is her heroine who has been shot in the leg. Are you going to ‘experience’ that too? And what about people dying in your books. You’re going to do that too?”
“Maybe that’s why Plato says the true philosopher has to die. To attain knowledge of death. Hard to send back reports, of course.”
“I’m going to stop here,” he said, peering at the screen suspiciously, “because I’ve got to decide what to do next. Where to go. I feel worn out by the sheer imagining.”
I got up to leave. “End of third movement?” I said.
“You might as well say it’s a bloodbath from here on in.”
It was only when I was walking along Central Park West, heading downtown, that I realized something:
There was a we-ird echo in his novel of what had been happening between Lee and me—had I not invaded his home (his Manhattan apartment), for all intents and purposes? I was just a lone guy and I was not threatening rape and murder, but still I had somehow managed to smuggle myself in, unsolicited, and I was tracking if not his every move then as many moves as I could cope with. But you didn’t have to shoot me to get rid of me: all you would have to do is write a strong scene about, for example, killing a bunch of home invaders: yes, that would do it.
THEY THINK IT’S ALL OVER
“DOCTOR CHILD!” Lee was holding open the door. I’d recently discovered he was a “doctor of letters” (hon.) somewhere or other.
“Professor Martin!”
“Only in the States. That’s why I come here, so people will call me ‘Professor.’ ”
“You mean you’re not a professor?”
“Mere lecturer.”
“An inferior rank? Why am I even speaking to you?”
“I’m the lowest of the low. That’s why you’re speaking to me. I remind you of you.”
“I’m going to get one of those serious academics next time.”
“I’m going to get a serious writer to write about next time. Martin Amis maybe. Or Jonathan Franzen.”
“Sit down and read this.”
I read it. Chapter 42. It completely killed me. Just as Reacher was killing one of the heavy mob all over again.
“I love that,” said Lee. “It’s so hard-core. So challenging.”
Reacher notices that one of the three guys is not dead yet. So cold-bloodedly finishes him off. This time it’s Stashower saying, “Reacher, this one is still breathing.”
“But you know the thing I really love about this,” Lee was saying. “It addresses the reader directly. It’s Reacher talking to the reader.”
Reacher has got his fingers pressed on the “carotid arteries” up near the ears of the second guy, the big mouth, who is not exactly talking much anymore, not since he had a big chunk of his neck blown off, but is not quite dead either. The idea is to choke off the blood to the brain and thus a quietus make. Stashower is shocked, indignant even. She thinks he needs a trauma surgeon. “You can’t do that,” she says.
Lee’s idea is that the queasy reader might be saying exactly that. And, again, “It fee
ls wrong.”
Reacher responds, while still slowly killing him: “The first time he was a piece of shit who was about to rape you at gunpoint, and now suddenly he’s some kind of a saintly martyr we should rush straight to the hospital? When did that part happen?”
Partly won around, she asks a more basic question—how long is this going to take? Thus giving Reacher the opening for a line that made me laugh out loud: “Not long. He wasn’t well to begin with.”
So, on the one hand, the scene is entirely naturalistic; on the other, the author is addressing the reader over the heads of the characters who are bent over—tending to—the guy stretched out on the floor. “The reader has to deal with it. The reader is saying all this to me. And this is my defense. I’m letting the skeptical reader have their say.”
Metaphorically, the iterative homicide scene looks ahead towards revelations to come and, finally, the end of the story. Again, through the figure of Reacher. “ ‘We’re doing him a favor. Like a horse with a broken leg.’ And, ‘…it’s peaceful. Like falling asleep.’ The holy grail of the suicide community. So this is a foreshadowing. I would say that was fairly deliberate. And there’s more: the heavies have killed the guard at the gate, ruthlessly, without a second thought, and Stashower calls what Reacher did an ‘assisted homicide.’ Yeah, it’s all coming into focus. Every death now is a way of riffing on the conclusion.”
Lee was going around strengthening the metaphoric “backbone.” Cutting out anything in the least superfluous. “I don’t care how it turns out,” Reacher says to Evan Lair, the doctor. “They’ll never find me. But I would appreciate a head start.”
“That sums up all of Reacher, really,” said Lee. But he had originally written “thirty-minute head start.” Then he slimmed it down. “It’s more resonant like that.” More Reacher. More mythic than realist.
“It’s all so cold-blooded here,” said Lee. But he wasn’t in the least apologetic. He was reveling in it. “We can’t shy away from the brutal.” It was one of the things he felt most strongly about having a recurring hero. “You have to be careful not to fall in love. Some authors get too hagiographic.”
He had two main examples. Dorothy L. Sayers. “She falls in love with Lord Peter, doesn’t she. After he gets married. The early ones are great. And they are great social documents too. Look at Murder Must Advertise: Wimsey quells a riot just with his accent.” He adopts a crusty old colonel’s voice. “I say, you there, stop it!” Some proletarian East Ender: “Oh, sorry, guv’nor, beggin’ your pardon. Won’t ’appen again, Your Honor.” Brilliant and plausible. But later on he just becomes cloying.
The second was more surprising. Thomas Harris, author of The Silence of the Lambs. “Obviously Hannibal Lecter is an insane cannibal in the first couple of novels, but believable. The Silence of the Lambs made a great movie too—the last one to take all the five main Oscars: film, director, actor, actress, screenplay. But when he comes back again—nine years later—it’s ridiculous. Suddenly he’s the world’s biggest wine expert. He was a psychiatrist to start with—now he can carry out brain surgery on living patients. It could be parody—either that or Harris just fell in love with his own creation.”
ALSO SPRACH LEE CHILD
LEE CHILD WAS STRUGGLING.
It wasn’t a total block, but the torrent had slowed to a dribble. “I’m spending hours on just a few lines here. The bloody ‘positioning scene.’ The trouble is, nothing happens, but you have to drop the weight in the right place. Vector everything towards Mother’s Rest.”
He took out his pipe, filled it with unadulterated marijuana from a pouch, and puffed thoughtfully. “This is just a maintenance dose,” he said. “A top-up.”
I drifted off to the kitchen, poured myself a glass of water, and went into the living room, with a still bare Central Park through the windows, the East Side in the distance across the lake. There are bookshelves at both ends: fiction south, nonfiction to the north. I pulled a biography of Beethoven off the shelf. Jan Swafford. Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph. Hyperbolic title, possibly justified. It was nicely done but at the same time entirely pointless so far as I could make out. Almost everything was unbridled hypothesis. Approximate quote: “Beethoven must surely have been feeling delighted [at some positive review or other]. On the other hand, being Beethoven, maybe not.” In other words, the author really had no idea. A void sucking in speculation backed up by hazy rhetoric and lyrical flights. And then the account of the writing of the 9th Symphony: so he starts with the “Ode to Joy” (from the last movement) and everything is bent towards that end. Maybe, but it reminded me too much of Sartre’s strictures (in Nausea) about biography being overly teleological: the end throwing a “radiant light of future passions” over the beginning and “catching time by the tail.” We live forwards (and therefore don’t know what is going to happen next), but write the symphony backwards?
I knew there was no “Ode to Joy” in Make Me. But then again, maybe there was. A joyful affirmation of riot and righteousness as Reacher gradually zeroes in on Mother’s Rest. The piece of music Lee had in his mind (I know because he told me when we were heading off somewhere in a cab and he was humming it) was actually the opening section of Also Sprach Zarathustra, the Richard Strauss tone poem, paying homage to Nietzsche, his concept of the Űbermensch, the will to power, and eternal recurrence—and used by Stanley Kubrick as an overture to 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was saying how, if you listen really carefully, you can pick out not just the visceral rumble of the organ, but the throb of double bass (tuned lower than normal) and a bass clarinet too, and then of course the timpani kicking in. Perhaps the whole opening section of 2001, in which a primordial ape-man finds a way to smash in the brains of a contending group of ape-men, was just the right accompaniment to the final movement of Make Me. The climax of a Reacher is a return to primitivism, a lethal burst of Lévi-Strauss’s “savage thought.”
“I’m over the hump now,” Lee said.
He had just realized something, which helped him a lot. “The more we understand about archaeology, the harder it becomes to acquiesce to the notion of progress.”
“True,” I said. “Meaning?”
“We always were vicious bastards. And we still are.”
TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE
“THE BOOK IS FINISHED,” said Lee.
“Your book?”
“Generally.” Taking the cigarette out of his mouth, he launched into one of his tirades. Mainly about the past, but unusually also about the future. Lee Child in J. G. Ballard mode. “The book is fundamentally a spoken medium. The audiobook is the future. I know, in some ways, that seems lame—like a National Health Service hearing aid. But the iPod has changed all that. We now have a generation that takes downloading for granted. And earbuds.”
Lee gestured towards all his books lined up over several shelves, as if looking forward to some imminent bonfire of the vanities. “Print is an aberration. Literacy never really caught on. We are going back to oral. Everything is oral. There is nothing beyond the…?”
“Song,” I chipped in. He was riffing on Derrida’s “There is nothing beyond the text.”
“Yeah, song,” he said.
“Rousseau says it was all song to begin with. The song of nature.”
Now it was the song of Reacher. Which is why he was planning what he was planning. The Great Read-Through. September 1, 2014, felt like a long time ago. Whereas the duration of the narrative itself (t1 Reacher enters town; t2 Reacher leaves town) was just a few days. “It’s strongly bonded. You can’t have: I took Friday off to do my invoices. One brick is half on top of the brick below for strength.” The “voice” had to be consistent, it couldn’t vary according to the author’s moods, good days and bad, or whether he had a toothache on a particular afternoon. “I’m in the groove right now. Was I in the same groove then?”
Even on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis he worked a little like this: he would go back a page or two, or a paragraph or two, and onl
y then work forwards again, using the previous as a platform, defining the key, or a chord. Backwards and forwards, again and again. Extrapolating. But when he got to around ninety thousand words, then he would normally go right back to the first page and read it all through to himself, sounding the words out in his head, to get a sense of the whole, the flow and trajectory and momentum. He could iron out the wrinkles if he needed to. He could “foreshadow.” He could “echo.”
“Come and listen to this.”
He took me through to the office. “Sentence I’ve just written. I’m really happy with it.”
I sat down on the couch.
He gave voice. “She touched the screen and the phone made a sound like a shutter.”
“Nice parataxis,” I said. “No subordination. And the simile, of course. Oh yeah and the sibilance.”
“It has a forward-leaning rhythm. And it’s all one syllable.”
“Apart from shutter.”
“Yes, you put that at the end of the line.”
“Like a feminine rhyme. The extra syllable. Gives it a cadence.”
It was exposition, plain and simple. And yet it had an onomatopoeic feel to it. “Sound like a shutter actually sounds like the fake camera noise that phones make.” All Lee Child prose aspires to onomatopoeia. It strives to make the meaning audible. To synchronize sound and sense. Because it’s a song. He gave me another example, another line he’d just written that day.
It’s about this very fat guy. He is the capo of the Russian/East European gang that has been harrying Reacher and Stashower ever since they left Mother’s Rest. Reacher tracks him down and shoots him, without much ado. Merchenko is colossal and sitting outside his strip club. “The sentence is deliberately ugly,” Lee said. “See how it dumps all the weight on the last word. It’s all shuffly and laborious. The fatness is in the rhythm, rather than just saying it.”
Lee reckoned you could actually hear all the “excess” syllables. “The sentence is trying to stand up, and it can’t.”