Book appraisal - MAKE ME

Lee Child’s twentieth Jack Reacher novel Make Me (2015) offers more of what his millions of readers have come to expect.

It begins with the clandestine burial of a guy called Keever, which is momentarily disturbed by the passing of a delayed night train, which is significant…

Reacher has dropped off at a one-horse town called Mother’s Rest. He’s merely curious how the place got its name, so stopped for an overnight stay to find out; he doesn’t get to know until p491; in the meantime, he meets retired FBI special agent Michelle Chang and learns she’s now running a private investigation business and is the backup called in by her associated Keever...

The pair hit it off and Reacher becomes intrigued by the apparent disappearance of Keever.

Their enquiries seem to upset some locals who object to their presence. Reacher’s first set-piece of violence (p92) deters two of them effectively. Chang and Reacher’s investigation takes them beyond the town (to Oklahoma City, Los Angeles and Chicago) and delves into the unpleasant depths of the internet, where lurks the dark side of human nature.

The pace begins in a leisurely fashion and gradually picks up until the set-piece denouement.

Child has a legion of fans because he writes page-turning stories that pull you in, and this book is no exception. It’s a fast read.

Many fellow writers are not fans of his books – for a number of reasons, not least perhaps because he isn’t ‘literary’ and uses simple vocabulary. [Reacher went and took a shower’ (p68)]. He’s not averse to repeating words in the same paragraph or page. He describes at great length places and buildings that have very little relevance to the storyline or scenes in the plot.

His book titles are often quite odd, too: Make Me is a good example. The only place I found those words was on p54: ‘Plus he calibrated it to make me younger than I am.’ The words may have popped up elsewhere. The meaning can be either ‘force me, if you can’ or ‘you have identified me’ – perhaps!

He’s good at dialogue. There can be pages of it, and not that many cues to signify who is speaking because it’s obvious in the context of what is being said.  When he does employ a speech attribution it is mostly ‘he said’ – Reacher paused a beat and said, ‘Who exactly are you?’ Or: Reacher said, ‘That’s you?’  Occasionally, he varies this: ‘Interesting,’ Reacher said. He doesn’t bother with alternatives to ‘said’ and it works just fine for him and, clearly, his readers.

He injects humour. ‘It’s going to be like picking a lock with spaghetti.’ (p162)

He doesn’t use f-words, settling for ‘bullshit’ most of the time. By doing this he probably alienates some readers who prefer more ‘realism’; yet this is fiction and escapism, so these thrillers don’t have to employ gutter language to strengthen the story. Indeed, he probably gains readership because he doesn’t have his characters ‘effing’ at all and sundry.

He’s good at confrontation and fight scenes. Tension is raised and details are dispensed for what might take only a few seconds but in slow-time seem longer as the words pour out. It is remarkable what can pass in the mind in a fraction of a second at heightened awareness, and he manages to convey this very efficiently on several occasions. Adam Hall’s secret agent Quiller would treat combat in a similar analytical vein.

He’s a master at cranking up the tension in a scene:

‘I’m getting impatient here.’

Wet lips.

Moving eyes.

Urgent.

No response.

Then Reacher… (pp334/335) Very filmic.

So, whatever Child’s perceived faults, his phenomenal success suggests that he has captured that elusive readability trait other writers hanker after.  

Editorial comment

More than once Child writes: ‘Reacher said nothing.’ (for example, pp291, 353 and 407). Sometimes other characters get the same line. Interestingly, there’s a book entitled Reacher Said Nothing by Andy Martin, which looks over Child’s shoulder while he writes Make Me. (It’s now only available second-hand on Amazon, and at silly prices too!)

An observation is made when a magazine is found with a bookmark at the front of an article. Reacher’s assumption is that the magazine owner hasn’t read the article yet. (p108). This doesn’t necessarily hold up: the marker could be there for future reference, the piece having already been read.

A number of significant if minor characters don’t have names. They’re ‘the one-eyed guy’, ‘the Moynahan who had gotten kicked in the balls’, ‘the spare parts guy from the irrigation store’, ‘the counterman’, ‘the hog farmer’, ‘the guy from Palo Alto’ and ‘the man with the ironed jeans and the blow-dried hair’ – the latter is sometimes shortened to ‘the man with the jeans and the hair’. The repetition of these ‘names’ becomes tedious, though they’re probably easier for the reader to identify rather than a single name. I appreciate the predicament; multiple characters with names can become confusing. Sometimes you can identify a bit-player by their description, which I’ve done before: One-eye, Spare-parts, Blow-dry, maybe. One of the most overused words in the novel is ‘guy’; it grates.  

‘Mrs Eleanor Hopkins, widow, previously a wife and a laboratory researcher…’ (p271) Well, yes, she would be a wife previously if she’s now a widow…

Book review - Web of Sand (Dumarest 20)

Twentieth in E.C. Tubb’s long-running Dumarest Saga, Web of Sand (1979)  is as entertaining as all the preceding adventures.

Some background:

The Dumarest novels are set in a far future galactic culture that spread to many worlds. Earl Dumarest was born on Earth, but had stowed away on a spaceship when he was a young boy and was caught. Although a stowaway discovered on a spaceship was typically ejected to space, the captain took pity on the boy and allowed him to work his passage and travel on the ship. By the time of the first volume, The Winds of Gath, Dumarest has travelled so long and so far that he does not know how to return to his home planet. Perplexingly, no-one has ever heard of it, other than as a myth or a legend. It’s clear to him that someone or something has deliberately concealed Earth's location. The Cyclan, an organization of humans (cybers who are surgically altered to be emotionless, and on occasion they can link with the brains of previously living Cyclans, in the manner of a hive mind process, seem determined to stop him from locating Earth. The cybers can call on the ability to calculate the outcome of an event and accurately predict results.

An additional incentive for the Cyclan to capture Dumarest is that he possesses a potent scientific discovery, stolen from them and passed to him by a dying thief, which would inordinately amplify their already considerable power and enable them to dominate the human species. Also appearing in the books is the humanitarian Church of Universal Brotherhood, whose monks roam many worlds, notably every world where there is war.

Long before the Borg of Star Trek, the Cyclan was assimilating humans, absorbing them into the collective consciousness.

***

Dumarest is onboard the spaceship Urusha with an assortment of passengers, among them Marta Caine who possesses a rare singing jewel. [I do wonder if this was Tubb’s nod to then popular singer Marti Caine, who died from cancer aged 50 in 1995.]

The passengers are abandoned on the planet Harge, a sandy planet owned by the Cinque, five families, namely The Ambalo, Yagnik, Khalil, Barrocca and Tinyeh responsible for the water, food, power, accommodation and transport. ‘On Harge you lived by their sufferance or you didn’t live at all’. (p12) People who fall into debt have to work off that debt for the families – or they are placed outside the secure dome of the city, where the sand will swiftly strip the flesh from their bones… Beautiful Ellain’s debt has been purchased by Yunus Ambalo and he treats her as one of her many prized possessions.

It was obvious to Dumarest that he and the others had been abandoned by Urusha’s captain on the instruction of the Cyclan. Their only hope was to amass enough money to purchase a ship off this planet. That entailed Dumarest fighting in the arena while his fellow abandoned friends took bets.  The opponent in the arena happens to be a repellent scaly sandworm! His appearance in the arena gets the attention of Ellain…

Afterwards, they become secret lovers and plot to escape the planet together. But that entails amassing more funds for transport. Intrigue, politics and betrayal are never far away, even at a fashionable party Dumarest attended with Ellain. Here, he tries the canapes: ‘Dumarest… selected a harmless seeming cone topped with a violet crystal, bit into it and tasted vileness.’ (p72) An offered ‘triangle coated with sparkling dust’ removed the bad taste. This, long before those sweets in Harry Potter saw the light of day!

The host at the party is Alejandro Jwani, who is a hunter of tranneks – stones deposited by the sandworms – which are ‘the hardest things known. Harder by far than diamond… and extremely valuable.’ (p82)

Also at the party is Marta Caine with her singing jewel. It’s clear that the jewel actually saps her life force in order to ‘perform’. A tragic scene, this.

Dumarest sets out with his friends to hunt for the tranneks, to sell them to Jwani. He employs a local guide, Zarl Hine to take him and his friends to the hills outside the city. They’re wearing protective suits that should survive normal sandy winds; they had no chance in a sandstorm, however.

During their absence from the city, Cyber Tosya lands on the planet and is welcomed by Yunus…

So Dumarest and his friends must confront the sandworms, a sandstorm, locate and collect tranneks and return to the city in one piece. No easy task – and there will be deaths…

The personal conflict between Yunus and Ellain, the tragedy of Marta Caine, the friendship between Dumarest and the others are the emotional core of the book. Not one of the Saga books is all-action, though the pace is quick thanks to Tubb’s slick style. Here, Dumarest is painfully reminded of his lost love, Kalin (from book #4 in the series). Yes, we know that Dumarest will survive – it’s a given in any series, the main protagonist will overcome all obstacles. He does change and grow as the books progress. But we don’t know who else will make it to the end of the book, and that creates suspense. 

This is the last book in my Dumarest collection; I’ll have to either locate #21 and the rest as second-hand paperbacks or purchase them as e-books to continue with the saga (the latter are published in the SF Gateway collection, presumably from Gollancz).

Of great interest is the Introduction by Tubb and a postscript by Philip Harbottle to be found in the front of The Return: Dumarest Saga #32 see here.

 

Editorial comment:

The editor should have spotted the transposition of letters for the character Jwani; there’s one instance of it being spelled Jwain (p73).

In Incident on Ath, Tubb used the name Hine for a cyber. In this book, he uses the name Hine for a prospecting guide (p91). This kind of thing is bound to be a problem with a lengthy series, the repeated use of a name. I’ve found the same concern when writing my Leon Cazador stories; I use a spreadsheet to keep track of all the names I’ve used!

Book review - The Garner Files

This is a memoir by James Garner (and Jon Winokur) with an introduction by Julie Andrews (published in 2011).

Garner died three years after its publication, in 2014, aged 86.

He began by observing that he’d avoided writing this book because he reckoned he was pretty average and didn’t think anyone would care about his life. He was browbeaten into writing it and he also felt it would allow him to acknowledge those who’d helped him along the way. ‘Here’s this dumb kid from Oklahoma, raised during the Depression, comes to Hollywood, gets a career, becomes famous, makes some money, has a wonderful family… what would I change? Nothing. I wouldn’t change a thing.’ (page xi)

As far as work went, in his early years he was a drifter. Then he went to Korea, got wounded [‘in the butt, how could they miss? (p27)], ‘I wasn’t a hero; I just got in the way a lot.’ (p30).

After stage acting he was hired as a Warner Bros actor, and he was being paid $500 a week. Eventually, he was called in to test for a new Western series. ‘They’d looked at just about every actor in Hollywood to lay a gambler wandering the frontier in the 1870s, but they picked me, probably because they… figured, Hey – we’ve already got this guy under contract, we might as well save money.’ (p51) He wasn’t happy about taking the role of Bret Maverick, he wanted to play in movies.

Jack Warner preferred recycling stories they’d already paid for, so the Maverick pilot was adapted from a book the studio had already purchased. Garner found himself wearing cast-off clothes from earlier movies to fit in with stock footage ‘re-adapted’ – standard operating procedure at Warners then. I can recall noting several recycled storylines in such series as Maverick, Cheyenne and others.

Garner was a little peeved (‘a little?’ I can hear him say) that he was still being paid $500pw when Maverick had displaced the big shows, Ed Sullivan and Jack Benny, which were making $25,000pw.

His view of the Bret Maverick character: ‘… quick-witted and quick on the draw, though he tries to avoid gunplay. But he’s no coward… exactly. He just believes in self-preservation… he only cheats cheaters… He’ll come to  your aid if there’s an injustice involved, and he’ll always stand up to bullies.’ (p58).

It took eight days to make a Maverick episode, starting on Tuesday and finish late Monday, usually. Since the episodes were being aired every seven days, they were inevitably going to run out of shows. ‘So they got the idea of adding a brother who could alternate with Bret.’ (p55)  Stuart Whitman and Rod Taylor were auditioned for the Bart Maverick part, and it went to Jack Kelly for $650pw…!

Warner Bros made 124 Maverick episodes and Garner was in 52. When he left the series, they tried to get Sean Connery, even flying him over, but he said ‘no’. Finally, they brought in Roger Moore (already under contract to Warners); he agreed to do it provided they’d release him from his contract at the end of the year; reluctantly, they agreed – and Moore went on to become The Saint.

He writes about many of his acting friends, and writers and directors, and offers plenty of insights into the profession in those days. He talks about his car racing with actors Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, and golf tournaments. And a lot of anecdotes, too; such as the on subject of autographs. ‘Paul Newman told Garner he stopped signing them forever the night he was standing at a urinal in Sardi’s and a guy shoved a pen and paper at him. Paul didn’t know whether to wash first before shaking hands… Gary Cooper wrote cheques for everything – gasoline, cigarettes, groceries, meals in restaurants – because he knew most of them wouldn’t be cashed. Coop figured he might as well get paid for signing his name.’ (p182)

He’s rightly proud of some of his film work, notably the TV movie Promise (1985) with James Woods, which dealt with the subject of schizophrenia. He comments, ‘I’m sorry to say that 25 years later, schizophrenia is the worst mental health problem facing the nation. Asylums have been closed, and government spending on mental health has been cut to the bone. There are new medications for schizophrenia, but though more expensive, they’re not much more effective than the old ones. And there is still no cure.’ (p195)

What caught my eye was his attitude to writers. ‘You can put the best actors and the best directors in the world out there, but they’re nothing without the written word. The script is sacred. I don’t improvise, because the writers write better than I do.’ (p171) ‘I didn’t get into the business to be better than anyone else. They give too much credit to actors, and I don’t think they should be singled out. It’s the writing. When it’s done right, acting isn’t a competition, it’s a collaboration. The better my fellow actors are, the better I am. If I get an acting award, I think I’m stealing it from somebody who deserves it more than I do…’ (p184)

Stephen J Cannell tells of a time filming Rockford. In five and a half years of the show, they’d never rewritten a line for Garner, but on this occasion he’s upset, he can’t get the line right. Cannell and Chase, the writer, suggest they can break the lines up, give some of it to Noah Beery. Garner said, ‘Change this line? Steve, this is a great line. I just can’t remember the goddam thing!’ So they never changed it (p231).

‘Every Christmas he gave each of the writers their scripts bound in beautiful red leather with gold lettering on the cover’ – David Chase (p233).

At the back of the book are comments from family and friends, reminiscences, a listing with comments of his films and TV work.

A fitting memoir – and memorial.

Book review - The Quillian Sector (Dumarest 19)

The Quillian Sector (1978) is nineteenth in the long-running science fiction series, the Dumarest saga by E.C. Tubb.

Some background:

The Dumarest novels are set in a far future galactic culture that spread to many worlds. Earl Dumarest was born on Earth, but had stowed away on a spaceship when he was a young boy and was caught. Although a stowaway discovered on a spaceship was typically ejected to space, the captain took pity on the boy and allowed him to work his passage and travel on the ship. By the time of the first volume, The Winds of Gath, Dumarest has travelled so long and so far that he does not know how to return to his home planet. Perplexingly, no-one has ever heard of it, other than as a myth or a legend. It’s clear to him that someone or something has deliberately concealed Earth's location. The Cyclan, an organization of humans (cybers who are surgically altered to be emotionless, and on occasion they can link with the brains of previously living Cyclans, in the manner of a hive mind process, seem determined to stop him from locating Earth. The cybers can call on the ability to calculate the outcome of an event and accurately predict results.

An additional incentive for the Cyclan to capture Dumarest is that he possesses a potent scientific discovery, stolen from them and passed to him by a dying thief, which would inordinately amplify their already considerable power and enable them to dominate the human species. Also appearing in the books is the humanitarian Church of Universal Brotherhood, whose monks roam many worlds, notably every world where there is war.

Long before the Borg of Star Trek, the Cyclan was assimilating humans, absorbing them into the collective consciousness.

***

The Cyclan know that their prey Earl Dumarest is among the worlds of the Rift and Cyber Caradoc is assigned to find him. And to aid him he has employed the greatest hunter of a hundred worlds, Bochner, who is not deficient in vaunting hubris. They make uneasy travelling companions. The cyber without emotion and the hunter who thrives on the thrill of ‘waiting for the quarry to appear, to aim, to select the target, to fire, to know the heady exultation of one who has dispensed death.’ (p14)

Finally they enter the Quillian Sector, ‘The place where space goes mad. Where the suns fight and fill the universe with crazed patterns of energy so that men kill at a glance and women scream at imagined terrors…’ (p17) Navigating through this mad sector is the spaceship Entil, and Dumarest is a crew member.

The Cyber is on their trail, but the strangeness of the sector hampers their tracking ability…

At the Entil’s last stop they picked up passengers and dropped off others, and Bochner came aboard as a passenger; bear in mind, the Cyclan want Dumarest alive.

Soon, on the Entil there is jealousy (concerning the charms of the female engineer Dilys) and sabotage. ‘Once the shimmering haze of the Erhaft field was down the ship dropped to below light speed, to drift in the immensity between the stars, to be vulnerable to any wandering scrap of debris which might cross their path – motes which could penetrate the hull and larger fragments which would vent their kinetic energy in a fury which would turn metal into vapour…’

The ship crash-lands and the survivors, including Dilys, Bochner and Dumarest must face nightmare creatures and privation – and a confrontation with Cyber Caradoc.

The pace never lets up. This is yet another fascinating and inventive adventure.

True, Tubb sticks to a tried and tested – and clearly popular – formula, with Dumarest constantly moving between planets and civilisations, encountering women who find him attractive, fights monsters and villains, often in arena scenarios, and by luck and guile evades the clutches of the Cyclan cybers. In its day, in the 1970s, if the special effects had been up to it, the Dumarest Saga would have made great television.

Editorial comment:

The editor missed the transposition of the spaceship name from Entil to Eltin! (p34)