It gives Child a lot of latitude in playing with the established formula without losing the essence of the character.
In some ways, this speaks to Child’s limitations as a writer, but then again, and as already explained, Reacher’s viewpoint and old-fashioned principles are why readers seek out these stories in the first place. In this, his 23 rd Reacher novel, Child devotes almost half of the story to a young Canadian couple trapped in an isolated motel, yet despite being fully-formed and empathetic their plight seems unmistakably that of Reacher too, even though their parallel stories don’t intersect until very close to the end. It seems the only voice he’s capable of speaking in is Reacher’s, even in, as evidenced by Past Tense, sequences which don’t even include him. I can’t think of a popular author besides Child who is better at communicating this kind of characterisation through prose. The great theme of all these novels is that it doesn’t so much matter what you do – by definition, most of Reacher’s adventures are sprung from arbitrary decisions made on a whim – but that you make a point of doing it well. In the same way that life is too short to not enjoy novels you otherwise would out of fear of being judged for doing so, it’s also too short to do things incorrectly. This is obviously a neurosis of the character, and one suspects of Child himself, but it’s also a neurosis that on some level most people wish they had. Everything he does – from eating to travelling to breaking arms and legs and necks – he does efficiently or not at all. Reacher’s world is one of optimal results. Reacher is an itinerant ex-MP (that would be Military Police, not Member of Parliament) who will intercede on behalf of the downtrodden, but he’s also a man who will sit down in a diner and internally criticise the crockery. And it’s that personality, more so than his penchant for vigilante justice or his implausible dimensions or his serial womanizing, which fans keep returning to.
And while Past Tense is indeed a Jack Reacher novel in the manner those fans will be expecting, it’s also a slightly better one than usual.Ĭhild’s sparse, utilitarian prose is compelling to me because, whether written in the first or third person, it utterly encapsulates the personality of his protagonist. For the most part, though, I count myself among their number. Not all of them, granted the absurdly popular author of these tomes, Lee Child, does have a tendency to rest on his laurels occasionally, secure in the knowledge that his legions of fans expect certain things and that as long as he provides them they’ll be perfectly satisfied.
I tend not to use the phrase “guilty pleasure”, mostly because I can’t be bothered appeasing snobs, much less the literary variety, which is to say that I totally and unironically love the Jack Reacher novels.
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