by Andy Martin
The only book I can think of that has taken me this long to read is the Bible, and I’m not sure I’ve read every single word of that. Or maybe Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, where I read the volumes out of order. But lost time: yes, perhaps that is the best way of thinking about reading—not in terms of chronology, of sheer duration, but of time that is not counted, not measurable, moments out of time, a Jungian synchronicity that encompasses or transcends mere clockwork. The great thing for me is that I still feel I have yet to begin the book that I have nearly finished. The book itself is virgin, undefiled, in fact inexistent. Make Me remains (as of writing) a virtual book, even though many would-be readers have already preordered it. They are confident that it will ultimately exist. But there is room to doubt this naive assumption.
I don’t doubt that there will, in due course, be copies of a tome claiming to be Lee Child’s Make Me. Many of them, indeed. In several languages, scattered around the four corners of the globe. My old blind friend, Terry, and her dog, Eden, will be able to listen to the audiobook. Perhaps Lee Child himself will read extracts to her, like some Latin crooner serenading his sweetheart. It is possible that Tom Cruise or others will think of translating the book into film, largely by virtue of junking most of it, perhaps all of it. But as to the existence of the book? Will we ever agree on precisely what that (to quote the author) is?
The CERN Large Hadron Collider in Geneva works by speeding up small chunks of matter to the max, spinning it around an underground track to see how it behaves under extreme conditions. I, in contrast, have slowed matter down to the max (constrained, as I say, by the author’s habit of goofing off on a regular basis and not slogging constantly like Stephen King). And yet, surprisingly, the Collider and I have come to similar conclusions. I have borne witness to the cataclysmic Big Bang, to the expansion of a fictional universe, which is still growing. And, rather like the ostensibly solid table or chair you are sitting on, it turns out on close inspection to consist very largely of empty space, an interstellar darkness lit up by seemingly random particles flitting this way and that, highly charged, spinning deliriously, like ceaseless roulette wheels. I suppose if I had to obey that onerous three-word rule beloved of publishers and publicists, I would have to say: It’s about…nothing. Flaubert would have been proud of it/that/whatever.
The origin of the name “Mother’s Rest.” Maybe that was the text’s “God Particle” (or DNA or quiddity or quintessence). Reacher finally gets an answer to his question, from a new girl at the motel. It’s a corruption of the original Arapaho name, she explains, meaning: “The empty place where nothing happens.” (An etymology destined to morph and warp.)
TIME-LAPSE PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE PENULTIMATE CHAPTER
(METHODOLOGY: SIT IN ARMCHAIR by Central Park window and read chapter of Seduction, bewitching 2013 romantic novel by M. J. Rose, then amble into office, take snapshot of latest, freshly minted sentence in Make Me, then back to next chapter of Seduction, and so on, until such point as author runs out of steam or patience or both.)
The guy came hard up against the pig pen fence.
Thirty.
Reacher said, “I don’t think they did.”
“That wasn’t the holy grail.”
For a second, he stayed upright, just a guy leaning on a rail, and then everything gave way at once, and he went down like liquid, in a sprawled puddle…
The hogs came running.
Not down here.
“What should I tell the cops about how they all ended up dead?”
Easy come, easy go.
Then they walked south through the plaza.
Himself, his photographer, all kinds of interns and staff.
Reacher walked with Chang to the diner where the red Ford was parked.
BOMBSHELL
LEE CHILD IS THE KIND of writer who likes to remove everything from the stone that does not resemble an elephant, as per Michelangelo, but then lop off a few limbs too, or, like Reservoir Dogs, an ear. He liked to “subtract,” as he put it. Which is how we ended up talking about poetry.
Lee was worried about sounding pretentious, but he had just written this:
The wheat moved in waves, heavy and slow and silent.
“I originally had just ‘slow and silent.’ But I wanted the wheat to be ripe. And it’s ominous too. Pastoral as usual, but ominous. So I went back and put in ‘heavy’ for its sound and suggestiveness. It’s longer and slower and heavier that way. I imagine a poet would do the same. I like subtracting, right down to the bare minimum. But then I also like to revel in completely unnecessary luxury. Go back to ‘Johnny B. Goode.’ Chuck Berry. Seems tight and economical, doesn’t it? But he revels in the language too. ‘A log cabin made of earth and wood.’ It’s an extra layer of description. He didn’t really need the earth and wood. He wanted the rhyme of course. But he gives you an exuberance…Yeah, I’m being economical, but I’m also reveling.”
He softened me up with the poetry. Then he hit me with the bombshell. “This may well be Reacher’s last adventure.”
[REACHER’S LAST ADVENTURE!? Time to absorb shock.]
How did he work that out, considering he is contracted to write at least one more? Oh, that will probably be a prequel, says he, indifferently. “So this could be it for Reacher.”
“Reacher rides into the sunset à la Shane? Or are you going to tip him off the Reichenbach Falls or what?”
“Remember we discussed how to end Reacher in Madrid?”
It came back to me then. Sitting in the evening sun on some plaza, not far from the Prado, and Lee was saying, “There is a question in my mind—when is the right time to stop?” But then he was still near the beginning, he had only just started, he had to keep on going; but now he was approaching the end and the “question” had returned with a vengeance.
“You were saying how you wouldn’t kill him off in the line of duty, no heroic death, no ‘aaaaaagh,’ but just leave him turning around at the bus station and saying, I think I like it here.”
“This is not that,” Lee said. “For one thing we have Reacher reaching out. That’s a first. He’s changed. ‘I need you with me,’ he says to Chang. It’s just a hint, but a hint in Reacher is the same as a total collapse. Of course he is still suffering some kind of brain damage.”
I still don’t know what happens in the final chapter. But I know there are forking paths. Chicago (Reacher’s destination) this way, Seattle (Chang’s base) that way. Reacher has to choose.
I knew he wasn’t going to write THE END. “If there is no more text, it’s obviously the end.” But the implication was that the end is nigh. For him as a writer. At least as author of the Reacher series. “What are you going to do?” I said. “Try long sentences or something?”
“You want short I can do short, you want long I can do long,” he said. The thing you couldn’t do as writer, he said, was fake it. “You have to write what appeals to you instinctively. And if that appeals to a lot of other people then you are a success; if not, then not. But you can’t be something else. It’s just impossible to do it. Especially in a downward direction. William Boyd trying to do a James Bond, for example. It’s probably easier to go in the opposite direction, but why would anyone bother?”
“Academics do it all the time,” I pointed out.
“I sometimes have people coming up to me and saying, with a note of contempt, ‘You write popular bestsellers!’ I reply, ‘What? You want to write unpopular worstsellers?’ ”
Sometimes he cracks me up. This was one of those times.
“Don’t worry about the end of Reacher,” he said. “I always feel like this at this stage of the process.”
Then he said, “The hogs have come back. I had no idea they would be so useful.”
Hogs, each one the size of a Volkswagen.
CLIFFHANGER
LEE CHILD FINISHED writing the final sentence of the first and only draft of Make Me at 12:24 P.M. on April 10, 2015. Which posed an ethical problem for
me. Should I know the ending? I had been worrying about missing the end; now I was worrying about not missing it. There remains something sacred about the telos. That after which there is only silence. Nada más. Maybe I ought to just bear witness, but not actually gaze upon the words. See, but not perceive. It was just a feeling I had.
“Do you want to hear this, or do you not want to hear this?” he said, impatient with my epistemological qualms.
“I’m glad just to have been here.”
“I [aaah in her Louisiana accent] would like to hear it.” Photographer Jené leBlanc was there to record the moment for posterity. Like all good observers she was bound to have an impact on the subject under observation.
So Lee went ahead and read aloud the whole of the last paragraph. There was a definite “Ode to Joy” feel to it.
“I feel like crying,” Jené said. “ ‘Get in the car.’ That is so powerful.”
“It has to land,” he said. “It’s like a plane landing.”
“What are you going to do to celebrate?” I said.
“I’m going out to buy toothpaste and kitchen towels. It’s getting ridiculous.”
Including the title, Make Me weighed in at 111,730 words. The last sentence alone made up sixty-seven of them. He had thought of it during the night, hardly had to change a word of it. It was an echo, a variation on a couple of other earlier sentences about Reacher and Chang driving, and then a line in the Mother’s Rest website, all about the “road.” Possibly the longest sentence in the book, right at the very end, to make a point (and, not coincidentally, the last word was “needle”).
It had taken him 222 days to write, from beginning, through the nonexistent middle, to the end. Moving…needle. Like an old vinyl record player. The song of Reacher. Pure analog. Or a compass.
“It’s like getting out of school.” Lee was unfolding himself, pushing away from the desk and getting out of his chair. “I can be normal again. Go out into the world. I’m going to have a different life now. At least until September.”
He still had to go back through the text one more time. “You can’t have the verbatim transcript of a guy ranting in a pub.” He would “keep the contour” but take out a few “maybe’s” and “the guy.” “It’s brought it home to me how intense this is, having you around every day. You come through the door and I think: Wasn’t he just here? Oh yeah, that was twenty-four hours ago. So a whole day has gone by and nothing has happened.”
At last he could go and eat a decent Indian meal. “I’ve been starving for the last month.” He had this lean, mean look, possibly even leaner and meaner than when he started.
Jené was taking pictures of him in the front room, reclining on the sofa. He was saying something about how he’d been “feeling crap since the age of fifty-five” and how there were “more leaves on the ground than on the tree” and “the meaning of life is that it ends” and Jené was saying something about how his books would live on. “People say I’ll be immortalized.” He lit another cigarette. “Ha! It’s all moonshine. As soon as I stop writing the front list, the back list will curl up and die.”
While she was distracting him, I went and sat down at his great metal desk. It felt like being at the beginning of something. A genesis moment. His text with his final paragraph was still on the screen, so I read it again then I opened up a new file. On his computer. The new blank window completely blotted out Make Me. I had my fingers poised over the keyboard, ready to type in the new title.
Lee came in.
He saw me at his desk, sitting in his chair, typing on his computer. Assumed I was trying to “destroy” his novel. Like I was about to write Un-Make Me. He had something in his hand. “A hollow-nose bullet,” he said. “Have you any idea what it can do to your insides?”
I said nothing.
E-LOG
April 11 [2015]
Lee Child to andymartinink
re My final draft
Read-through with different font and spacing always illuminating. Cut 2,303 words—now 109,427.
Strikes me Keever was a well-rounded and well-developed character for a guy who was dead the whole book.
Attachment.
April 12
andymartinink to Lee Child
Finished Make Me. There are no grapes left in the fridge.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
All the conversations in this book really took place. I made a lot of contemporaneous notes. In the interests of authenticity, any modifications are minimal. A few “um”s and “er”s got omitted just to speed it up. Expletives have by and large not been deleted. The timeline is as faithful as I can make it. The names are real (unless they are actually fictional). The quotations from Make Me are as I originally heard them or read them—they don’t always correspond exactly to the text as it finally appeared. But they have an archaeological value.
To all those loyal readers of Lee Child who may have bought this book by mistake
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks are due to all the people who appear in this book and a few who don’t.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANDY MARTIN is a native of Britain, where he lectures at the University of Cambridge for the Department of French. He is the author of Waiting for Bardot, The Boxer and the Goalkeeper, Walking on Water, The Knowledge of Ignorance, Stealing the Wave, and Napoleon the Novelist.
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