Child Abuse
Despite being something of a book nerd, I confess I hadn’t heard of the British thriller writer Lee Child until I was unfortunate enough to see him taking part in Jennifer Byrne Presents: Bestsellers and Blockbusters on ABCTV a couple of weeks back. Now I know exactly who he is: one of the most conceited men in the world.
I had tuned in to the program because there are few things I find more entertaining than watching a bestselling author bang on about how they get ‘no respect from the snooty critics’ or ‘recognition at awards time’. This standardised rant is always accompanied by the author’s assertion that ‘the sales figures speak for themselves’ and prove that they ‘must be doing something right’. Why can’t these writers simply be happy with the vast sums of money they earn every year? You don’t hear McDonald’s complaining that they haven’t been awarded three Michelin hats for their latest Bacon Burger DeLuxe. Readers of ‘airport novels’ don’t give a toss about critics or awards, so why should their authors?
Joining Ms Byrne on the set normally occupied by far more high-falutin’ literary types were three of Australia’s biggest-selling authors, Di Morrissey, Matthew Reilly and Bryce Courtenay, along with the US-based Mr Child, and the talk immediately turned to ‘bestselling formulas’. ‘There is no formula,’ claimed Di Morrissey with breathtaking disingenuousness. ‘I don’t think any of us here write to a formula.’ Really? Has Morrissey, the author of The Valley, The Bay, The Reef and The Islands ever written a book that wasn’t about a middle-aged woman finding herself, and love, in an exotic locale? Has Matthew Reilly ever written a book where someone’s head didn’t ‘explode like a can of tomatoes’, where someone or something wasn’t ‘tossed around like a rag doll’, or where machine-gun fire didn’t make something ‘light up like a Christmas tree’? Has Bryce Courtenay ever written a book where ‘painstakingly researched’ historical information wasn’t awkwardly crowbarred into a character’s mouth? Here is a line of dialogue from page 473 of his last novel, The Story of Danny Dunn. See if you can speak it aloud while maintaining a straight face:
‘I’m afraid we’re not a lot better here, Dallas. Homosexuality is still a crime in Australia, and quite recently Danny defended one of our major writers, proving conclusively that the police had attempted to blackmail him in order to extort money. While Danny won the case, the police were let off with a rap on the knuckles, and Danny said the only reason he won was because his client came from an old, moneyed and very influential family and was revered by the literati.’
Stop laughing! This is the work of our most beloved writer!
Now I’m not denying that, since I started writing this column, each of these authors has shifted more books than I will sell in my entire lifetime, but let’s not pretend for a moment that they aren’t writing to a formula or that what we’re talking about qualifies as ‘literature’. Way back in 1990, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie made over a hundred million dollars at the box office, but I doubt that its makers were too put out when their work wasn’t recognised at Oscars time. And I shouldn’t imagine they’d be foolish enough to claim that their film is anywhere as good as, say, Sideways, which did only a fraction of their business.
And don’t get me wrong – throughout the show, Morrissey, Reilly and Courtenay largely came across as good-humoured, and all seemed positively self-effacing when compared with Lee Child (who, if you’ve never seen him, looks like a precise cross between Paul Barry and Roger Moore.) Right out of the blocks, he felt the need to undercut the massive international success of Swedish author Stieg Larsson by implying that his books were hits mainly because their author was dead. And having made this point, he then felt the need to double back and make it all over again, announcing (with the very pompousness he rails against) that he had been reading Scandinavian crime fiction since the seventies (Reilly, rightly, burst into laughter at this point) and that the poor dead Swede’s work is ‘no better than that’.
All the panellists then made short work of ‘the critics’, with Di Morrissey stating that ‘there’s no proper criticism in this country’, solely because her books are not always reviewed. Then it was on to the real villains of the book world, the ‘literary’ authors. Those who have the audacity to write books where nothing explodes, and where various models of fighter aircraft are not correctly identified on every third page. Said Child:
‘The difference between literary and what we do is that in popular fiction we do the work and the reader enjoys the ride. Literary people seem to think the reader should do an awful lot of the work and try to puzzle it out and figure it out. And actually, in my books, every word is polished, the reader doesn’t have to puzzle it out. The reader gets in the car, I’m driving the car.’
The car that, in most cases, immediately blows up.
So, hang on, these literary cunts, they’re…what? Lazy? Slacking off? Leaving the reader to ‘do all the work’? I assume he’s referring to that half-arsed concept ‘ambiguity’, a concept that is, according to Child, completely devoid of enjoyment. Actually, I remember reading a lot of books where you didn’t have to ‘figure anything out’ and where ‘the work’ was already done for you. I used to love those books…when I was fucking five!
Child, on a roll, then declared that literary authors ‘know, in their heart, that we could write their books but they cannot write our books,’ adding that ‘I could write a Martin Amis book. It would take me about three weeks, it would sell about 3000 copies like he sells. And they are jealous of that skill.’
Jennifer Byrne, gallantly taking on this revolting bully, then said, ‘But that absolutely assumes that they would want to do what you do.’
Replied Child, ‘Well, who wouldn’t? I mean, come on.’
At this point, you may be wondering what exactly it is that Child does do. I did, and so decided to check out some of his books. Turns out they all feature the same protagonist, the hilariously named Jack Reacher. Is there anyone alive who can see that name without thinking of the word ‘reacharound’? Which is, after all, the service Mr Child is offering, standing behind the reader and relieving him of the awful burden of thought.
His first Jack Reacharound novel, Killing Floor, opens with these words:
‘I was arrested in Eno’s Diner. At twelve o’clock.’
Another one, One Shot, starts with:
‘Friday. Five o’clock in the afternoon.’
His latest, 61 Hours, kicks off with:
‘Five minutes to three in the afternoon.’
I’m sure those literary authors are, as Child claims, seething with jealousy over his ability to establish the correct time in the opening lines of his books. And like any announcer, having told us the time, he moves straight on to the weather. In 61 Hours, he goes on to say:
‘There was a bitter wind out of the North. It was thick with fat lazy flakes.’
Thick with fat lazy writing, more like it! Lazy flakes? This is the man who ‘polishes every word’? Here is the opening paragraph of Tripwire:
‘Jack Reacher saw the guy step in through the door. Actually, there was no door. The guy just stepped in through the part of the front wall that wasn’t there. The bar opened straight out onto the sidewalk. There were tables and chairs out there under a dried-up old vine that gave some kind of nominal shade.’
Nominal? Note how that word jumps out at you, tripping up the eye and distracting with its lumpen awkwardness. This is the smooth car ride we were promised? Child loves to drop into his opening pages what he obviously thinks are terse, ironic observations. From page one of The Enemy (how bland are the titles?):
‘Nobody knows what a fatal heart attack feels like. There are no survivors to tell us.’
But surely anyone who has experienced a near-fatal heart attack has a fairly good idea? It’d be exactly the same, wouldn’t it, except that you wouldn’t wake up?
From page one of Gone Tomorrow:
‘Suicide bombers are easy to spot. They give out all kinds of telltale signs. Mostly because they’re nervous. By definition they’re all first-timers.’
But isn’t the main thing about suicide bombers that they aren’t easy to spot? That they blend easily into a crowd? But I guess that fact doesn’t allow you to get to what is really just a variation on the old joke about the failed kamikaze pilot.
You may have noticed that all my quotes are from opening pages. Call me a literary snob but, frankly, when an author announces that he’s already done all the work, I don’t feel the need to go any further. It’d be like eating at that restaurant in the old SNL sketch ‘Pre-Chewed Charlie’s’.
Back at the Jennifer Byrne show, Child, his grasp of cliché fully in evidence, declared again that if you were a literary author ‘starving in a garret’ you would be unable to resist doing what he does. Replied Byrne, ‘I think some people feel so strongly about their art that they wouldn’t, but maybe I’m wrong.’
Child: ‘I think you’re wrong.’
In a New York Times interview available on-line, Lee Child says, ‘I can go days without speaking.’ What a blessed relief that must be for those who know him.
But, of course, not all so-called literary authors are ‘starving in garrets’. Plenty of them make a pretty decent living writing about people. Real people. In real situations. Messy real-life situations that, despite perhaps being ambiguous or unresolved, are situations we can all identify with and, dare I suggest, enjoy. The opening pages of Child’s Running Blind see Jack Reacher sitting alone in a restaurant, looking at two men and wondering whether he will have to ‘break their arms’. According to Child, every literary author, ‘in their hearts’, wants to write a scene like that. About a man sitting alone in a restaurant, deciding whether to break someone’s arms.
In fact, I don’t for a moment think that Lee Child could ‘do what they do’ in three years, let alone three weeks. That is, write something like Rabbit at Rest or The Remains of the Day or Cloudstreet or even Martin Amis’s Money. Because if he could, wouldn’t he have done so by now, just to make his point? I think he knows ‘in his heart’ that without scenes where somebody has to decide whether to break someone’s arms, his cupboard would be as empty as Eno’s Diner at twelve thirty-five on a morning where the air is filled with fat lazy flakes and nominal shade.
Late in the program, we discovered just how Child really sees his readers. Turns out his real name is Jim Grant and that he chose the nom-de-plume ‘Child’ because it’s a word ‘that produces normally warm connotations in people because people usually like children’.
I’ll wait here while you go and throw up.
Sure, most people usually do like a child, but not everybody likes to be treated like one.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). Most recently, he directed new episodes of ‘The Librarians’, which returns to ABC1 on October 13.
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