by Lee Child
The establishment changed Robin himself most of all. First they made him a strong supporter of King Richard (see above – preserve the monarchy by throwing John under the bus) and then they started to inch him up the social scale, in what seems to have been a permanent and irresistible pressure on any British narrative, true or imagined. I suppose it was a class thing. Like Shakespeare – obviously such a genius can’t just have been an oik from the Midlands, so clearly he was really the Earl of Oxford. In Robin’s case, such a sturdy and beloved Englishman can’t have been just a yeoman. So by the end of the sixteenth century he was the Earl of Huntingdon. The audience went along with the conceit, and the fundamental description of a folk hero was cemented in place – a person of status, in some way cast out, breaking the rules for a just purpose.
This basic specification had been foreshadowed before, and would be repeated again. For instance, I remember reading Ovid’s retelling of the Theseus legend, in school, in Latin. On the bus home I was reading Dr. No by Ian Fleming. And I noticed I was reading the same story, two thousand years later. A man of rank (a prince; a Commander in the Royal Navy) not exactly cast out but disapproved of and barely tolerated, fights a grotesque opponent in a secret underground lair, with the help of a woman from the other side (Ariadne; Honey Ryder) and technological intervention (the ball of twine; Q’s arsenal) and comes home to a mixed reception. The form was durable.
I used it myself, unconsciously, when I started writing. I needed a main character, but felt that overthinking his specification would beat the life out of him, so I wrote based on instinct – which is to say, based on everything I had ever read and subliminally absorbed before. And sure enough, Jack Reacher turned out to be a man of rank (a major, a West Point graduate) now cast out from mainstream society (albeit voluntarily, by his own hand) and dispensing rough justice outside the mainstream rules. (Very rough justice – I saw a capsule description of the Reacher series on the internet that said, ‘This is a detective series in which the detective commits more homicides than he solves’.) As such, Reacher slotted very neatly into the folk hero tradition, specifically the knight errant subgroup, which seems to be universal in appeal – as in, for instance, the Japanese ronin myths, in which a samurai, disowned by his master, is sentenced to wander the land, doing good. For me the trope was so strong it overrode common sense and quotidian realism, in that the hands-on experiences implied in Reacher’s backstory are those of an NCO or warrant officer, not those of a commissioned officer, and almost certainly not those of a West Point graduate. But my subconscious led me to the knight errant myth, and a knight errant must have been a knight to start with, so a major he was. Military insiders are very aware of the discrepancy, but they still enjoy the fiction – which I take as proof of the power of that ancient, evolved story structure.
The political use of the word ‘hero’ started with the dawn of mass communication and continues today. First its definition became detached from classical notions of protracted journeys and struggles, and it became a word bestowed upon anyone who did any brave and good thing – an honour always in the gift of the establishment or its mouthpieces. The downward direction of the dispensation, in terms of social class, is best observed in old newsreels of, say, the FA Cup Final. First the fruity voice on the crackly soundtrack patronizes the spectators (usually northerners, ‘up’ in London ‘for the cup’) and then there’s some game action, and a sentence of commentary, dripping with irony, saying something like, ‘The hero of the hour was Stanley Matthews’. Dripping with irony, in order to emphasize the purely metaphorical use of the word, as if to say, obviously a common footballer can’t really be a hero, but we’ll say so anyway, to indicate how caught up we are in the cloth-cap-wearing ferret-lovers’ passion. (Although Matthews was knighted later, thereby perhaps becoming capable of unironic heroism.)
More sinister was a migration away from mere description (be it ironic, halfhearted or wholehearted) toward the pre-emption or influence of debate. The 1919 Housing Act – which proposed significant public expenditures – was boosted by the slogan ‘Homes Fit For Heroes’. It’s hard to say out loud (because of a century of pre-emption and influence) but of course most First World War soldiers were not heroes by any definition – many served in a reluctant and desultory manner. Army slang is full of terms for malingerers. No doubt their experiences were horribly unpleasant and uncomfortable, but the automatic association of ‘soldier’ with ‘hero’ was explicitly political, as it still is, and served to short-circuit discussion, as it still does. The establishment press responds to, say, a controversy about an individual soldier’s actions long ago during the Irish Troubles, by mounting a campaign that could be headlined ‘Hands Off Our Heroes’. The nudging ‘heroes’ is compounded by the ‘our’ – a smug, wheedling assumption of agreement, intended to prompt, even coerce, and equally to suggest the presence of an ‘other’ who doesn’t share ‘our’ values. A toxic atmosphere can quickly be created, both physically – in 1918, in Phoenix, Arizona, a man declined to buy a Victory Bond (he couldn’t afford one) and was beaten to death by the crowd – and mentally, in that criticism of military actions and behaviours is now effectively forbidden, especially in America. Instead, we are invited to ‘Salute Our Heroes’, and let them board the airplane first, even though the beneficiary of our coerced cooperation is probably a warehouse clerk deployed to New Jersey.
Bestowal from-on-high of the plaudit inevitably became ridiculous. A school-crossing keeper is called a ‘hero’ for working for forty years. The England football team survive a group stage in an international tournament and the players are called ‘heroes’. Combining both the trivial and the coercive, I just got a flyer from the Department of Motor Vehicles in Wyoming, where I live part-time. It is headlined ‘Anyone Can Be a Hero’. It says that if you have the donor symbol on your driver’s licence (I do) then you have made ‘the heroic decision to save and heal lives by donating your organs, eyes and tissues at the time of your death’. So now having your corpse cut up when you’re already dead is enough to guarantee heroic status.
For these reasons and more I avoid the word, and distrust the concept. I have no heroes and recognize none. ‘The main character in a popular book’ is good enough for me, especially if that character lights up the circuits that evolution has wired inside me. I need encouraging, empowering, emboldening and consoling, the same as anyone else. Happily there are a lot of writers who know that. They aren’t dumb. I have needs, they have aims. Together we purr along, in a system designed by the ages. All good.
Except not really. There’s a problem with my 1,198-times great grandmother. There’s an unthinking assumption that evolution is always progress, natural and inevitable. Like farming. Scientists don’t always question this assumption. They can’t. Just the facts, ma’am, and what they can prove, and so on. They can explain the science in amazing detail, and they can show you astonishing DNA research, and they can say with confidence that perhaps as few as two thousand breeding pairs of humans survived the last glaciation on the whole of the landmass we now call Europe. But their necessary anodyne academic-journal tone slides on by too quickly. They say, ‘Four thousand lucky people survived’. The novelist stops and thinks, OK, but who were those people?
Conventionally our long, eventful seven-million-year evolutionary journey is thought of as an inevitable ascent toward ever-increasing perfection. Which it might be. Or not. It depends on where we started. Who are we descended from? Who was my 1,198-times great grandmother? What kind of person survives an eight-hundred-generation Ice Age? Such a thing doesn’t happen by accident. Potential survivors didn’t sit around hoping for the best. They spent eight hundred generations kicking and clawing and killing and stealing. Maybe they started on the Neanderthals. Then they started on each other. Conditions got worse. The nice guys died out. By the end the human population was reduced to the nastiest handful. My 1,198-times great grandmother was one of them. One of a savage, feral, cunning bunch. They wou
ld kill you as soon as look at you. They would steal your food and shelter. A ferocious will to live, with the emphasis on the first part. My ancestors. Hopefully diluted by subsequent random mutations, but to at least some degree, and always, a part of me, and of the characters I like to read, and the characters I like to write.
About the Author
Lee Child is one of the world’s leading thriller writers. He was born in Coventry, raised in Birmingham, and now lives in New York. His books consistently achieve the number-one slot on bestseller lists around the world and have sold over one hundred million copies. Two blockbusting Jack Reacher movies have been made so far. He is the recipient of many awards, most recently the CWA’s Diamond Dagger for a writer of an outstanding body of crime fiction, the International Thriller Writers’ ThrillerMaster, and the Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award. Lee Child was awarded a CBE for services to literature in 2019.
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