I attended a talk by Lee Child not too long ago. A member of the audience asked whether he personally shared the same moral values as those of his character Jack Reacher. Millions of readers see Reacher as a man of principle waging a battle on behalf of “the good guys” against thugs, gangsters and criminals, but also as a man who seldom hesitates when it comes to inflicting harsh punishment on “the bad guys”. More than once in the novels Reacher responds to another character questioning him as to whether he feels any remorse at all when killing one of the baddies. Nope, says Reacher, it’s just like moving the trash to the sidewalk. He is, in other words, a man who inflicts vigilante justice when, in his own view, it is deserved.
Child responded to the question from his audience in similar fashion (I paraphrase here): “Nope, not entirely,” he said. “In the real world the bad guys win most of the time. We all know that. So, when I write fiction, for a couple of hours I get to turn the universe upside-down and ensure that the good guys win and the bad guys suffer. Horribly.”
I had occasion to ponder this very recently after I received an unexpected email from a fellow student from many years ago. She is now a prominent academic, and she was kind enough to say she had read “The Mashego File” and had some very positive things to say about it (and some helpful critical things, too: she said she’d like to read another book starring Mashego, but would like to see him not skating quite so close to violent vigilante justice next time).
I was worried, for a moment, that she might think the student she used to know had become an advocate of cruel vigilante justice. I wrote to her to say “I hope you don’t think for a minute that [inserting my real name here, rather than my pen-name] personally endorses Mashego’s moral world-view. When you meet me and [inserting my wife’s name here] you will see that we live and breathe restorative justice, policing by consent, and all things progressive. This other fellow, Ian Patrick, though, is much more morally slippery: although I’m still getting to know him as he writes, I think he likes to delve into darkness in the fictive world only in order to return, cleansed, to deal more intelligently with darkness in the real world.”
I had a further thought about all of this, which I also shared in my email to my newly rediscovered friend. Henrik Ibsen kept a live scorpion in an empty beer glass on his writing table. He explained thus: “From time to time the brute would ail; then I would throw in a piece of ripe fruit, on which it would cast itself in a rage and eject its poison; then it was well again.”
When I contemplate Ibsen’s scorpion I think that by using Detective Mashego to deal out vigilante justice to the bad guys I am ejecting the poisonous revulsion I feel about brutal crime. I can then emerge from my study a little cleansed, in order to contemplate more civilised debates about crime, punishment, and moral justice.
Ha. Totally agree with these sentiments.
Good article. Most interesting.
I completely agree with these sentiments. I often wonder about this question but you argue it very succinctly.