Lee Child and Lynda La Plante

Comparing quality amongst the thrillers I’ve been reading lately, I have to say that Lee Child is probably the surprise winner. On paper, the semi-political adventures of an ex-military policeman didn’t sound like something that would appeal to me, but Jack Reacher, the 6’ 5” hard man with a soft side, completely won me over. I read Gone Tomorrow, which is a narrative written from the first person perspective – something I gather Child doesn’t do with all the books? – and the inside of Reacher’s head turns out to be a beguiling place to be. This story begins on the New York subway, late at night, when the woman sitting uncomfortably close to Reacher shows almost all the signs of being a suicide bomber. After a brief losing battle with his conscience, Reacher decides he has to intervene and that’s all the plot details I’m going to give you; much of the pleasure of this novel for me lay in the intricacy of the plotting, which was masterfully done. It’s not easy to unfurl a plot in a strictly linear direction whilst keeping the reader guessing continuously and yet supplied with all the information needed to prevent the least hint of confusion. Watching Child masterfully pull this off was like watching a gold medal winning Olympic hurdler; it seems impossible that the odd rhythm can be sustained so smoothly, that the figure sailing over the hurdles won’t clip one and tumble, and yet it all comes together with grace.

Reading Child reminded me why thrillers are such an engaging reading experience. It’s not just the pull of the plot, although that particular pleasure shouldn’t be underestimated. No, the power of the thriller lies in the lure of identification with the action hero. By the time most of us have reached the age where reading a thriller is either possible or tempting, we’ll have discovered that fearful situations bring out the worst in us. Few will find ready access to the resources of strength, courage, determination, and cunning strategic thought, instead we’ll mostly freeze, literally petrified by the mere thought of threat. Thrillers try to persuade us that however terrible the situation, some sort of fight or flight is always available to us. Jack Reacher is a masterclass in serenity, even in the toughest of troubles. Nothing fazes him, no bully or assassin arouses more than fairly jovial contempt. His intellectual faculties zip along and never interfere with him throwing a monster punch. The man is invincible, and it’s a chortling kind of delight to stowaway inside his perspective for the ride. For the most part, his fortitude is so plausible it’s invisible, but I couldn’t help but notice that I, myself, would not choose to down a whole pot of coffee accompanied by a bottle of mineral water, before setting off on a life-or-death mission of extreme nervous tension. You see what I’m saying.

The other curiously appealing element of Child’s creation is the fact that Reacher is homeless. In surprising defiance of orthodox existence, Reacher lives hand to mouth, with no fixed abode, even throwing away his previous shirt when he buys a new one. His life is a fantasy of perfect economy, which means inevitably he must always be mixed up with other people’s business because he has none of his own. He’s of necessity placed in the interstices of life, where crime happens, and his investigations involve some ingenious uses of the oddly half-public, half-private spaces that modern life has created – hotel rooms and lobbies, transport vehicles, anonymous cafés. The back of my book describes him as a ‘mythic avenger’ which is a lovely phrase and accurate – he emerges out of nothingness with only his sense of right and wrong, his desire to safeguard the innocent and annihilate the guilty, and that’s terribly romantic. For all this, though, be warned that the violence in this book is far more graphic. When the women from Afghanistan started getting the knives out in a video nasty they send to Reacher, I knew to skip the next few paragraphs. Mister Litlove, who borrowed the book and read it on holiday in one mammoth day-long session, did not have the same good sense, became quite hot and bothered, and had to be settled down with a cup of tea and encouraged to think of other things afterwards.

Lynda La Plante’s novel, Silent Scream, is quite a different kettle of fish. Although the quote on the cover describes La Plante as a thriller writer, this is actually a police procedural. The author will probably be best known to most people as writer of the Prime Suspect series, which memorably starred Helen Mirren, and echoes of that set-up abound in the narrative. The story concerns a young British film star, the exquisitely beautiful Amanda Delaney, who is found viciously stabbed to death in her luxury mews house. Although she appears to be the envy of all, on the cusp of international stardom, involved in a string of affairs with handsome actors and wildly rich, her death soon brings a more sordid reality to light. She turns out to be an anorexic drug addict, psychologically tormented and cruising towards her own annihilation. Investigating her death is DI Anna Travis, a young version of Helen Mirren, who is ambitious, hard-working, clean-living and talented. For all this, she’s a mere cipher in the narrative, never really cohering into a proper character. On the plus side, this is a narrative context designed to be instantly appealing – the film world is accurately depicted, there are numerous suspicious characters, and despite her two-dimensionality, we cheer Anna on, not least against her competitive and patronizing male colleagues. And again, this is a tightly plotted story that handles its multiple strands with enormous competence. I was never lost for a moment.

On the negative side, I’m not sure when I’ve read a book that was so poorly written by such a well known ‘name’. The characterization is perfunctory at best, leaving the reader to draw on stereotypical figures from the television screen (whence they evidently come), and the dialogue is often awful, designed to get the information across in the quickest time but entirely without finesse. The funny thing was, this didn’t seem to spoil my reading enjoyment at all. I scoffed a bit, but I continued to turn the pages as fast as they would go. It turns out that you can dispense with all that beautiful writing business so long as you have created a sufficiently taxing enigma, and you bombard the reader with tantalizing information. All I wanted was that information, and I agreed with Lynda La Plante: why should I bother to care about the protagonists? Why should I find their predicaments plausible? Why did I need to consider complex, layered moral situations? None of it mattered, compared to that hunger for the solution.

And so this was perhaps the most intriguing aspect of my thriller binge. Reading these books, I could feel myself transforming as a reader. I was happy to gobble them down, quite thoughtlessly, and it was relaxing in the moment. But once I’d finished them, I couldn’t help but notice how little of substance remained (certainly with the La Plante). There was nothing for me to mull over, nothing for me to take away. Not, you understand, that I wish to knock this experience. Far from it, as I enjoyed it immensely and I have no tedious guilt feelings that insist I read more worthy books in future. But I did find that the thriller regulates itself, in the literary digestive system. Afterwards, I craved a more subtle and nuanced reading experience, something that would make me think and feel. And I realized that thrillers are great mind cleansers – they take you, precisely, to a place where you don’t need to think or feel, which is paradoxical considering the subject matter. They put you in a safe bubble of threat and menace that other people are about to deal with. There is much that is restful and reassuring about that kind of reading experience.

I realize I am behind on answering comments at the moment – I’m so sorry! I LOVE my comments, never think they are not appreciated, and I’ll reply to them as soon as I can. You all know how tricky it is to keep up with all the blog housekeeping, I’m sure.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

I’ll return to the topic of reading on the weekend, but before that I’ll have to put my money where my mouth is, as it were, and try to catch up on some of the reviews that have piled up in my blogging break. When I first stopped blogging, I suddenly had no idea what to pick up to read next. My reading life has been so organized by the prospect of discussing certain books online that, cut adrift from the community, I simply couldn’t decide what I wanted to read just for myself. But looking back over the past couple of months I can see I’ve read a surprising number of thrillers, partly because they were recommended to me, partly because I find it more comforting to read about people killing one another than falling in love. The moral outcome is always more certain in the narrative world. But the books themselves turned out to be more intriguing than I had bargained for, too: genre fiction is often as packed full of interest as the most complex literary novel.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a most curious reading experience as I’d heard so much about the novel in advance and had convinced myself it wouldn’t be for me. I knew it was extremely popular, but the reviews I’d read had, for the most part, condemned the novel roundly for excessive violence against women. My expectations of gore and horror were so high that when I actually read it, it seemed perfectly tame. There is indeed violence recounted and on a couple of occasions, violence depicted, but this is essentially a cerebral novel, a puzzle-solving novel, and it keeps sufficient distance from events to leave this reader unaffected. The violence is bound up with the central story that concerns the disappearance of Harriet Vanger, granddaughter of a Swedish business mogul in a large and sprawling family as dysfunctional as any you could hope to find in any American soap opera. Only this is Scandinavia, where it’s cold and dark and the surface gloss of technology and efficiency hides a virulent underbelly of unnatural and unspeakable acts. Many years have passed since Harriet’s disappearance but her grandfather is obsessed with her loss still, and hires disgraced journalist, Mikhail Blomkvist to crack the old mystery, under cover of writing a family memoir. Mikhail links forces with a distinctly strange young researcher, Lisbeth Salander, who turns out to be a computer hacker of the highest order, and then the sparks begin.

Salander is undeniably the most compelling character in the narrative, and the most paradoxical. She’s a bit of an enigma herself, autistic in the expression of her emotions, completely immoral, but violent and feisty and graced with bionic brain power. She struck me as a grown-up version of the kind of character who features a lot in teenage adventure fiction: the damaged victim who, thanks to technological implants, has become part bionic. She’s so engaged with her computer hacking that she’s half cyberwoman, an amalgam of the Matrix and Lara Croft, but in a good way. I read a lot of comment on the web angsting over whether this was a feminist-friendly portrayal or not, and I can understand the confusion. She’s clearly damaged, ie, readily identified as feminine, but sidesteps this by focusing on her mental powers, ie, readily identified as masculine. She falls in love with Blomqvist, so yes, feminine, but when one of the bad guys makes the mistake of hurting her (in what must be the most famous scene of the book) she enacts her revenge with visceral power in a way that had me cheering her on, I admit. My problem with the whole feminist-argument thing was that the feel of the character was, for me, beyond gender, something more alien altogether.

In comparison, Mikhail Blomkvist is the girly one. I was more intrigued by the feminisation of his character than the roboticised overlay on Salander’s. Blomkvist is the ostensible hero of the book, a man of strict ethics whose journalistic career has been forged in the crusade against corruption in the financial world. The whole Harriet Vanger story is encased by a huge frame narrative concerning Blomkvist’s disastrous attempt to nail a dodgy financier, a quest that has landed him in all sorts of trouble (well, in a jail sentence for libel, in fact). And once the Vanger mystery has been solved, Larsson has to wrench the narrative back towards Blomqvist in order to clear his name. Mikhail might be one of the good guys in the fight against organized crime, but his love life is bizarre. Across the course of the narrative he manages to have three unadvisable liaisons, all of which he seems to inhabit with notable passivity and a lack of genuine emotional attachment. I wondered whether this was to hold him clear of the value system at work, in which violence against women is perpetrated out of an excessive need for mastery and possession. Certainly no one could level that charge against him. But it’s a shame that his deeper message, about corruption in high places and the ugly complicity of the media, gets a bit muffled in the overall sweep of the novel. This is a book with deep moral convictions, but I suspect them of having more to do with the movement of money and resources than with gender politics.

Perhaps what does make this thriller satisfying is that the pairing of Lisbeth and Mikhail seems greater than the sum of their parts. And the plot is deftly woven, steadily revealing enough information to readers to keep them hooked on the unfolding mystery. Around that story, though, the contradictions are what caught my attention: the odd mix of biblical violence with twenty-first century technology, the Ibsen-ish gloom that descends on family life with its horrible secrets and lies, and the rather delicately burgeoning romance between the main protagonists. The excess of information that is strewn around the book, pages and pages of information given to us and created by Lisbeth, against the cold hard kernel of enigma at the novel’s center. I liked the colour and the taste these contradictions brought to the narrative, and I could see why Swedish crime has taken off in such a big way. There’s a certain ruthless efficiency at work in the investigation that provides a delightful counterpoint to the primitively dark and disturbing nature of the crimes. But it all adds up to the impression that Sweden is not perhaps quite as nice as you may think. And that’s paradoxically fascinating as a thought, too.

Oh dear, why DO I go on so much? I’d hoped to discuss three books today and look, I’m out of space and time already on just the one. I’ll try to fit another post in on the weekend.