Author: Paraic O'Donnell

The Reacher Guy by Heather Martin

The subjects of literary biographies, by and large, are both widely revered and safely dead. There’s no great mystery in this. Chunky biographies are a seasonal phenomenon, among the dependable unit-shifters that can hold their own in the pre-Christmas big leagues. And the consensus seems to be that – unlike, say, footballers or former commandos – most living writers just aren’t box office material.

There are exceptions, of course, and at first glance it might seem inevitable that Lee Child should make the cut. He’s long been a celebrity writer, a very different breed from celebrities who’ve written books. But as Heather Martin’s title suggests, that’s not what makes him truly interesting. Lee Child created Jack Reacher, a character of such gigantic appeal that even this A-list author remains in his shadow. And to invent Reacher, Lee Child first had to invent himself.

James Dover Grant, or Jim to all who remember him, was born in Coventry in 1954. But it is to Birmingham that he holds allegiance, having moved there with his stolidly middle class parents at the age of four. As Martin shows, this tribal loyalty is deeply felt. He remains a passionate Villa fan, naming a roster of Reacher characters for select former players, and he identified deeply with the city’s artisanal traditions. ‘They really knew how to make stuff back then,’ he remarks. His example is a perfect custom-made bolt, turned out in half an hour by a local craftsman, but it was a virtue he would come to prize in other forms.

But his origins became the subject of mythmaking too, a theme that recurs in this warm-hearted but meticulous study. Lee Child’s IMDb entry, as Martin observes, strikes a more stylised note: ‘[He] was born…in the heart of the industrial badlands. Never saw a tree until he was twelve.’ Unsurprisingly, this is a bit of a stretch – the Grant family home was on Underwood Road, ‘a broad treelined street’ – but the Lee Child brand wasn’t entirely a later invention. Like him, the young Jim Grant knew a thing or two about packaging and selling himself.

Martin shares the recollections of a former teacher, who recalls Jim fondly (they shared a love of theatre), but who was wise to his capacity for shapeshifting. He was ‘a slippery, shadowy figure’, the teacher confides, but the image he projected was a product of ‘unusual sensitivity’. It was a sensitivity that made him susceptible to slights, not least by the parents he remembers as ‘cold and unloving’.

More than anything, though, Jim’s sensitivity made him clear-eyed about his surroundings. Electrified by the early Beatles singles, he watches them storm America and a fiery ambition took hold. ‘Four guys had escaped,’ he later wrote, ‘in the biggest possible way’.

The first step was a job in television, where his now fully formed swagger proved an asset. ‘Look no further,’ his application read. ‘I’m your man.’ He was, as it turned out, and if his boozy and swashbuckling days at Granada yield relatively few salacious anecdotes, they are not without standout moments. In one such episode, we see the young Turk face down a senior manager who orders him to transmit the one o’clock news. It was a non-union production and his NUJ colleagues were in a dispute with the bosses. Jim refused. That he was quickly reinstated following his subsequent firing made his stand no less ballsy and principled. Reacher himself would surely have approved.

But the choicest insights, at least for fans of the novels, are those that shed light on aspects of craft. This too is central to the much-burnished public persona, and for believers it is now an article of faith that he writes only one draft and disdains all forms of planning. It’s a legend the seasoned practitioner may well have grown into, but the young novice laboured towards perfection like anyone else. Over two riveting pages, we see him honing the opening lines of what would become Killing Floor. He junks the unpromising first attempt entirely, and it takes five or six iterations before he gets to the two indispensable sentences that now seem graven in stone: ‘I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock.’

Martin is a clearly a fan – who isn’t? – but the scholar in her keeps those impulses in check. Her archival diligence – and an obvious rapport with her subject – allow her to gently puncture the Child mythos when needed. But scholars are close readers, too, and she is just as good at combing the text for telling quotes, for traces of Child in Reacher; for traces anywhere of the hulking but vulnerable boy that Jim once was. She is a skilled and audacious interlocutor, too, but her subject is just as adept an interviewee. He is unfailingly suave and frequently beguiling, but forthright only in his pronouncements on others. Even his moments of candour can seem precision-engineered. Still, a few are starkly affecting. ‘I was looking for love,’ he confides, by way of accounting for his chosen path. The superhuman Reacher may be loved by millions, but it’s the Reacher Guy who has the edge: He knows what is to be human.

This review originally appeared in The Irish Times.

An edited version of this review originally appeared in the Irish Times.

If some literary fairy godmother had intervened in its fate, she could hardly have engineered a more gratifying outcome than the real-life reception of Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13. Garlanded by critics (including this one) and nominated for several major prizes, it has also been embraced by readers to a degree that – given its outwardly austere subject matter – could hardly have been taken for granted.

The arrival of The Reservoir Tapes, a companion piece that first appeared in serial form on BBC Radio 4, suggests a certain confidence in this public enthusiasm, yet even those readers who admired the original novel may wonder if this new volume, appearing only eight months after its predecessor, is deserving of their attention.

Such doubts are quickly dispelled. Broadcast over fifteen episodes, and billed as ‘perspectives’ on the central events of the novel, The Reservoir Tapes revisits the small community in rural Derbyshire from which thirteen-year-old Becky Shaw disappeared. We hear first from Charlotte, the missing girl’s mother – or rather, we don’t. The arresting opening episode takes the form of an interview, but the transcript has been redacted so that only the halting and fragmentary questions remain. ‘I know this is difficult,’ the anonymous interviewer says. ‘I wasn’t implying.’ But she is, of course, and her prompting is so precisely shaded with suggestion and insinuation that Charlotte’s wounded and flinching presence is conjured without a word.

The effectiveness of such techniques is assured, in part, by McGregor’s uncanny ear for the tics and cadences of everyday speech. In the novel, his lucent and graceful descriptive passages competed for our attention, but these pieces confine themselves to the characters’ own accounts, lending them the documentary fascination of true crime and a suspense that depends – as in that genre – on the omissions and obfuscations of witnesses; on what they insinuate about others and what they reveal, knowingly or otherwise, about themselves.

Their lapses are subtle at first. Recalling a hike he led, a man notes that a group of girl guides ‘swayed when they walked, with the weight’. It might be nothing, this detail, but we begin to wonder. An elderly bachelor helps a young boy to fix his bicycle, then invites him in to ‘get scrubbed up’. The man will not let him leave until his hands are entirely clean.

These intimations become increasingly unsettling. A woman falls abruptly silent when her husband raises his hand. (‘Like getting ready to swat a fly.’) A sheep farmer assisting in the search is recognised in a TV news interview by a sex worker who encountered him years before, and who recalls an incident of naked brutality and one that revealed, perhaps, the shadowy contours of pathology.

In ‘Clive’s Story’, the most unnerving of these pieces, the same elderly bachelor is visited by the police. Questioned about his encounter with the young boy, he lapses into a rambling monologue, and what follows is a masterclass in the gentle escalation of unease. From banal ruminations on reservoir maintenance, Clive veers into a creepy rhapsody on the marvels of anatomy, reflecting on the graceful musculature of swimmers before offering his thoughts – and at this point we are wondering just how much of this monologue is internal – on the miraculous intricacy to be observed in a skinned rabbit.

‘We are well made,’ he muses, recalling his scripture at the queasy climax of the passage. ‘We are fearfully and wonderfully made.’

These stories, too, are fearfully and wonderfully made, though it is difficult to articulate just what they add to the experience of Reservoir 13. That book that was widely praised for its lightness of touch, and for the immersive effect of its sparing accretion of detail. These pieces are certainly not unsubtle, but whereas our suspicions, in the novel, were formed from no more than glancing impressions, we are presented here with much starker portraits, especially of men, and there is a heightened amplitude to our sense of dread. If the subject matter were different, we might be tempted to conclude otherwise, but coming as it does at the end of a year of grim revelations about male abusers, the fresh ‘evidence’ collected here has about it a weight of necessity.

It brings us no closer to ‘solving’ the novel’s mystery, but that was never the point. In any small town, these stories remind us, slithering nests will lurk in the shuttered hearts of men; in any small town, for as long as their secrets are kept, women and girls will suffer at their hands. This much, dismally, is no mystery at all.

An edited version of this review originally appeared in the Irish Times.

‘Ordinary things,’ the novelist Marilynne Robinson once remarked, ‘have always seemed numinous to me.’ Jon McGregor may not share Robinson’s preoccupation with the divine, but there are few writers whose work has more consistently affirmed the luminous dignity of the everyday. His debut novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, took as its subject an unnamed city street and the inner lives of its residents. Panoptic and quietly rhapsodic, its very title seemed to announce his intentions as a writer. ‘If you listen, you can hear it,’ it began. ‘The city, it sings.’

And sing it did. There was no shortage of beauty in this early work, though its painterly effects tended at times to eclipse its characters, presenting not so much human interactions as exquisite tableaux vivants. McGregor has long since learned to temper these excesses, honing his lyrical gifts and yielding the foreground to his characters. His growing stature has not gone unrecognised. Longlisted twice for the Booker prize, he won the Impac Dublin Literary Award in 2012 for Even The Dogs. Even by the standards of his mature work, however, McGregor’s latest novel is a remarkable achievement.

Set in an unnamed town in the English midlands, Reservoir 13 seems at first to tread familiar ground. A young girl has gone missing, and in the darkness of a midwinter morning the search is beginning. ‘It was cold and there was little conversation. There were questions that weren’t being asked.’

The missing girl, Rebecca Shaw, had been on a family holiday and had formed only a few tenuous friendships. In the photograph that is circulated her face is ‘half-turned away’. She is remembered variously as ‘Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex’, an elusive and prismatic presence in the town’s collective consciousness. Most people hardly knew her, but rumours are repeated. Stories are told. Spring arrives, and still Rebecca has not been found.

Life goes on. It is a comforting truism, something we tell ourselves in the aftermath of shocking or inexplicable events. Yet to a writer of McGregor’s particular gifts, the banal can present invigorating challenges. Life does go on, undeniably, but how? How do we absorb events like these, and how do they alter us?

To answer these questions, McGregor returns to the broad social canvas of his first novel, but his undertaking here is far more ambitious. The author himself posted a partial dramatis personae on Twitter that ran to eighty-odd entries. Many are recurring characters, not fully developed in the usual sense, but skilfully realised nonetheless. They emerge in glancing encounters, the narrative’s perspective slipping unobtrusively among them. The effect is cumulative and subtle, leaving us with a precisely calibrated sense of familiarity. These are people we might see on the school run, or speak to while queueing at the post office. We can only glimpse their inner lives, guess at their secrets.

McGregor’s prose throughout this novel is as near to faultless as makes no difference.

At times the narrative drifts apart from human company altogether, pausing to observe the foraging of fox cubs or to mark some small increment in the progress of the seasons: ‘The sun cut further into the valley and under the ash trees the first new ferns unfurled from the cold black soil.’ Descriptive writing of this kind is often praised for its ‘arresting’ beauty, yet these passages are remarkable precisely because they do not halt the reader’s momentum. Indeed, McGregor’s prose throughout this novel is as near to faultless as makes no difference. Fluid and fastidious, its sparing loveliness feels deeply true to its subject. There are moments, as in life, of miraculous grace, but no more than that.

There is beauty, likewise, in the moors and in the beech woods that surround the town, but this is no mere idyll. Here too the life that persists is driven by animal necessity. Unfledged blackbirds are taken by crows. Goldcrests feed in the churchyard yews. We see summers end (‘the butterflies rose like ash on the breeze and the ice-cream vans still appeared’) and winters encroach again (‘the sheep were nicotine-yellow against the fresh snow’). The missing girl is spoken of still, as the years pass. There are occasional ‘sightings’, though these are no longer taken seriously. She recedes in the town’s memory, but never quite vanishes. Suspicions arise (as when a school caretaker is found in possession of child abuse images), that may come to nothing.

It is a mark of greatness in a work of art that its effects, though profound, are not easily accounted for. Reservoir 13 is not a crime novel, at least in the traditional sense, and its central mystery is more than just a procedural puzzle. We do not come to know Rebecca Shaw, but we feel in the end that her life has been given a solemn and particular weight, its traces documented until they are too faint to be seen. In her absence, the swallows come and go. People marry or move away. There are moments of sadness, of squalor, of indelible beauty. Look, this humane and tender masterpiece is saying. This is what becomes of us. This is what remains. Life goes on.

Reservoir 13 is published by 4th Estate.