Jack Reacher
Persisting against the odds
As I said last week, no reading is totally wasted on a writer. And it’s on that basis and in that spirit that I’m sharing a couple of books which I haven’t particularly enjoyed, but which taught me something, including respect for extremely talented authors who know just how to create and maintain suspense and conflict. Perhaps at this point I should come clean and admit that I’m not a fan of violence or torture in fiction, which definitely colours my reactions to certain genres of writing, but I’m also very aware that I can’t afford to be naive and stick my head in the sand.
I’ve written positively about James Patterson‘s psychological thrillers in the past, especially his series featuring Alex Cross, a psychologist and police detective – the why of it all intrigues me. So Target (Alex Cross) jumped out at me. It features the death of a female President of the USA, closely followed by the assassination of a whole raft of Senators and other politicians who are in line to take over running the country, not to mention a few other bodies who might loosely be described as collateral damage. Hmm, the advice ‘suspend disbelief ‘comes to mind!
It’s incredibly complicated plotting, simultaneously following a number of different assassins as well as assorted investigative agents and teams struggling to connect the dots and track down both the perpetrators and their masters. The deaths are gruesome, the cold detached disregard for life chilling, but I could respect the mind behind the tale, holding together so many threads, weaving in so much technical detail, and even slipping in a tug at the heartstrings when one couple become assassins to make enough money to take their dying son abroad for cutting-edge therapy. Though I found aspects of the book barely credible, I have to recognise this as story-telling at a high level of complexity and skill.
Harder to stomach though, was In Too Deep by Lee Child and Andrew Child. Lee Child’s protagonist, Jack Reacher, was known to me by name but I hadn’t made his acquaintance, so I fished In Too Deep out of a tub of discounted books in a charity shop, to fill that gap. Well, I needed all my wits about me for this one, and I still floundered at times.
The story begins with Reacher himself suffering serious injuries in a car accident – broken wrist, concussion, severe headaches and blurred vision. Not, you might suppose, in any fit state to be solving complex crimes or chasing dangerous armed criminals. The first half of the book is told with parallel stories in sections within chapters: one stream about Reacher defying the odds despite his injuries, trying to outwit a ruthless gang of crooks, some of whom remain unnamed just to further complicate identification; the other stream following the crooks trying to pull off a major heist, outwit the authorities, and threaten world peace and safety, all with backstabbing a-plenty to confuse me still further. Oh, and goodies and baddies are apt to change sides. Fries my brain! But overall, I guess its biggest value was in identifying the things I don’t like in fiction.
Hey, I persevered, and softened the experience by keeping the needles flying with the Christmas knitting as I read.