The Satisfaction of Good Stories

I recently took an entire week off work. It was mainly to finish my book for B&H Academic, tentatively called From Futility to Hope: A Theology for Creation Care. I also tried to unravel the knots of stress and encroaching burnout I was feeling from months of busy work, teaching Sunday School, trying to finish the book, with the only break since the New Year having been invested in the not-so-restful travel to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.

To set the mood for what I hoped would be a creative and productive week of editing, I kicked the week off by reading a completely fluffy book: Lee Child’s first novel, Reacher: Killing Floor. It was a recommendation from a friend. It sounded interesting because I was looking for some relatively mindless reading that I could consume without too much effort.

Reacher met the mark. It was largely predictable and cliché. It was filled with the nearly-super hero who went to “the Point,” which is what Naval Academy graduates call their second choice. There were cultural inconsistencies, a really odd career timeline for Reacher (which Child acknowledges), and attractive women who were suddenly attracted to the rugged protagonist. Aside from the lack of sharks, the book is prime beach reading.

The story had few redeeming qualities, other than being quite engaging and thoroughly entertaining.

Sneaky Serious Content

The introduction, however, was a sneak attack on the person looking for brain candy. There are some nuggets worth considering that Childs tossed into his introduction, added fifteen years after the book was first published.

When mulling the genre of this novel, Childs assesses why his books were widely popular. It was because he was writing for the audience, but he wasn’t writing down to the audience, which results in cheesy, overdone fiction. Instead, he notes, “Along the way, I discovered I was the audience.” He quotes Chesterton on Dickens, “Dickens didn’t write what people wanted. Dickens wanted what people wanted.” Thus, he’s writing lowbrow fiction in exactly the fashion he would like to receive it.

There’s a secret there, I think. C. S. Lewis, in his essay, On Three Ways of Writing for Children, describes (1) writing down to children, (2) writing for particular children, and (3) “writing a children’s story because a children’s story is the best art-form for something you have to say.” Lewis affirms the second and participates in the third way of writing to children. The first he describes as being “generally a bad way,” which is pretty severe criticism in the vernacular of the British Isles.

Childs’ assessment is fair. It is obvious in Reacher that the writer is enjoying the little plot twists too coincidental to be believable, the overdone perfection of the main character’s ability and perceptions, and inevitability that the hero will ride off into the sunset to his next adventure.

The book—and I presume the series––rely on Reacher as the prime mover and only focus for the story. There isn’t so much a plot as performance art by the ex-Army MP. Childs admits that storyline and plot are secondary elements for his writing: “Character is king. . . . So, my lead character to carry the whole weight.” And he does.

A Western Connection

The result is a fairy story for adult males. Childs claims to have modeled it after stories of knights errant. I tend to agree with other readers who, as Childs notes, “classify the series as a set of modern-day Westerns.” Though he does not fully agree, he notes this Western-Reacher connection “is convincing in terms of feel and structure.” Childs claims not to be a fan of Westerns, but he has noted that “Westerns too have strong roots in the medieval knight-errant sagas.”

I read the introduction after I read the rest of the book—remember, I was trying to veg out. But I had already pegged this is a Louis L’Amour (Childs references Zane Grey) with more sex and more graphic descriptions of violence. Childs is on the right track here.

This is a knight-errant story. It is a modern Western. It is exactly what many readers want to read.

The Reacher Series has been successful because it provides a good guy––without doubt about his moral compass––who is trying to unself-consciously punch the big guy in the face and set wrongs to right. This is a book about a character who knows which way he is headed and won’t bend to polls or shifts in public opinion.

The Power of Stories

So many contemporary stories–-movies and books––fall short because, to quote Harry Flugelman from The Three Amigos, they “strayed from the formula, and [they] paid the price.”

This is why the recent sequel to Top Gun has had ridiculous box office success and staying power. Maverick is predictable, it is cliché, and it is thoroughly enjoyable. The same is true of Louis L’Amour and the Lee Childs novels.

What do the people want? They want someone to look up to who isn’t really just a villain in disguise. They want to be treated as if goodness, honesty, and self-confidence are admirable traits. They want the hero to win and the bad guy to lose, but not just on a technicality.

The fact that people want that—even people who think the metanarrative of Scripture is a new Facebook feature––is an indication of the eternity that is written on the hearts of all humans. (cf. Eccl 3:11) It can be a foothold for the gospel, if we are willing to tell the old, old story well.

That desire for wrong to be set right and for a hero who is a good guy can point straight to the greatest story ever told. I think that is what makes Reacher: Killing Floor such an engaging story. And that makes me question how we Christians are telling stories and telling the story.

Maybe telling the great story of Scripture is more powerful than reasoning people to Christ. And we may find it helps that our great hero story also happens to be true.