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chrisam 's review for:
The Midnight Line
by Lee Child
I'd like to see Steve Aylett write a Jack Reacher novel. It would mostly be about Jack realising he's a homeless drifter who goes around beating people up and has very little else in his life. FWIW there are moments of this self-realisation in this novel from time to time but they shortly end when he gets himself into yet another situation where he will have no choice but to use extreme force (which is a bit like saying that if you jump in the lake you have no choice but to swim. You do however have the choice to walk across the bridge). There is much to be said about drug addiction and social exclusion among veterans of America's many conflicts but once we had "Rambo" - and for that matter "Born in the USA" for those who bother to listen to the words - did we need it again and again?
Second idea: Jack Reacher is Amnesiac!Doc Savage. While wandering around America beating up bad guys he is incessantly assailed by visions of five boon companions with strange names like Ham, Monk and Renny, an eyrie atop a skyscraper in New York (the 86th floor) and a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic until that big blue-and-red bloke from Planet Zog decided he'd like it instead*. Over 23 novels he comes to the chilling conclusion that he has been submitted to the same medical procedure that he used on bad guys back in the day (which removes criminality but not, it transpires, the limbic crocodile-brain need for violence**). At the end of one novel we see him lumbering off towards the Arctic, shoeless in the snow, searching for his mythical Fortress of Solitude. * this - Doc and Superman sharing the Fortress of Solitude - has already been written.
** in an otherwise meretricious novel I wrote, called "Brothers of the Shadow," the good guys have a procedure which removes aggression. A villain tries using it on one of the good guys, and finds out to his cost that it doesn't remove the instinct for self-defence. If we aren't to have Doc lobotomising his enemies then his Procedure needs to be more like this in the new version.
Second idea: Jack Reacher is Amnesiac!Doc Savage. While wandering around America beating up bad guys he is incessantly assailed by visions of five boon companions with strange names like Ham, Monk and Renny, an eyrie atop a skyscraper in New York (the 86th floor) and a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic until that big blue-and-red bloke from Planet Zog decided he'd like it instead*. Over 23 novels he comes to the chilling conclusion that he has been submitted to the same medical procedure that he used on bad guys back in the day (which removes criminality but not, it transpires, the limbic crocodile-brain need for violence**). At the end of one novel we see him lumbering off towards the Arctic, shoeless in the snow, searching for his mythical Fortress of Solitude. * this - Doc and Superman sharing the Fortress of Solitude - has already been written.
** in an otherwise meretricious novel I wrote, called "Brothers of the Shadow," the good guys have a procedure which removes aggression. A villain tries using it on one of the good guys, and finds out to his cost that it doesn't remove the instinct for self-defence. If we aren't to have Doc lobotomising his enemies then his Procedure needs to be more like this in the new version.