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Guy Haydon

Personal 
	by Lee Child
	Bantam Press 
	3 stars
British-born author Lee Child and his big, brawny hero Jack Reacher - a former US military policeman turned wanderer who metes out brutal justice to bad guys wherever he travels - both seem to have lost their way. Again.
The success of the past 18 fast-paced novels in the series has seen Reacher become a global "brand" - and also a successful film character portrayed by superstar Tom Cruise. All of the books featuring the 1.96-metre-tall avenger - punctuated with bloody, bone-crunching violence leading to deadly denouements - have been bestsellers; the just-released 19th book, Personal, has topped sales charts around the world, too.
The new story, told in the first person, sees Reacher's panicked former bosses track him down to ask for help. They need him to find John Kott, a former US army sniper Reacher put in jail for murder. An attempt has been made on the life of the French president by a sniper using a rifle and a special armour-piercing round, from a range of 1,400 metres.
"How many snipers that good do you know?"
"None," I said. "I don't hang out with snipers."
"How many did you ever know?"
"One," I said. "But it's obviously not him … he's in prison … I put him there."
"He got a 15-year sentence, correct?"
"As I recall," I said. I did the math in my head… I said: "S***…"
"He's been out for a year."
"Where is he?"
"Not at home."
Two renegade foreign marksmen - one from Britain and another from Russia - are possible suspects, but Reacher believes Kott, who retains a fierce hatred for him, is the most likely culprit.
So he teams up with a female State Department agent, Casey Nice, in a race against time that takes them to Paris and London, as they try to stop a suspected attack on other world leaders.
While asking questions in a tough city neighbourhood, they are trapped and heavily outnumbered by a ruthless gang: Nice is left to fight off one man while Reacher confidently takes on four - armed with just a chair. "I was smashing the desk chair into the second guy's head. Into it, not over it. Like a lion tamer. Because jabbing is better, like a punch, your whole moving body weight concentrated through the inch-square end of a leg … I was aiming for a broken skull at the minimum, and instantaneous brain death at the maximum."
The death toll rapidly rises as Reacher and Nice race on in search of the elusive Kott.
Personal has all the elements that have earned the series fans around the world since Reacher first drew blood in 1997's Killing Floor: brutal death, roller-coaster action and heart-stopping tension. Readers know what they will get as the relentless hero hands out bloody retribution, yet still they have been thrilled. This time, though, the thrills are more muted.
Reacher is an adept killing machine, an expert marksman and formidable fighter with a gun or knife, his fists, feet, elbows and, equally potently, a headbutt. However, he's a fully rounded, credible character, too: a man of courage, honour, and integrity, with a good mind for logic and figures - and a love of ladies in distress, who always vanish once his mission is over.
Child's loner with a talent for explosive violence usually stands tall - a good head higher than most people - making him an easily identified, physically threatening adversary. In Personal, it is Reacher's turn to be dwarfed for once, by a giant foe: a murderous 2.18-metre-tall thug named Little Joey. A fight to the death is guaranteed.
Child - the pen name of Jim Grant, a former television producer - always stacks the odds heavily against Reacher, either standing alone or alongside a trusty female companion and sometime love interest. But he always wins. Being predictable has never been much of a problem in the past for Child, when he has ended his books with his typically stunning finales that leave readers wanting more.
However, Personal is a letdown, as it runs out of steam long before the dull ending. After a promising, action-packed spell early on in Paris, the plot is then bogged down by laboured pacing and contrived confrontations. Child struggles to bring the urgency of old to his fight scenes.
The prerequisite for any successful action thriller - a slam-bang fight-to-the-death showdown - also eludes him. It's an enormous anticlimax that leaves the reader flat - just like the endings of Child's two most recent, hugely disappointing books, A Wanted Man  and Never Go Back (which is being made into Cruise's second Reacher film).
Child has storytelling skills, but Personal  fails to dispel the growing feeling that the stories are getting stale and repeating themselves with ever diminishing returns. Could Cruise be to blame? It may just be coincidence that those stories that have most struggled to provide the same impressive level of shocks - and gruesomely appealing coup-de-grace finales - have come since Cruise signed up to play the role in 2012's Jack Reacher.
The actor, reportedly only 1.7 metres tall, was a controversial choice with fans of the books to take on the role of Reacher, a man with a physique Child described as looking like a condom crammed with walnuts. In 2000, when Child was first asked by a British newspaper which actor he favoured to play Reacher, he suggested Russell Crowe, adding, bluntly: "Definitely not Tom Cruise; he's too short."
Later, in a volte-face, he said it would be impossible to find a suitable bankable actor who resembled Reacher.
After Cruise signed up, Child said: "Tom Cruise was always interested in playing Reacher, and he has the acting skills to pull it off … With another actor you might get 100 per cent of the height, but only 90 per cent of Reacher. With Tom, you'll get 100 per cent of Reacher with 90 per cent of the height."
Cruise has acquitted himself well in the entertaining adaptation of one of the best Reacher books, One Shot - which sees the hero determined to bring to justice a ruthless sniper who has killed five people. Yet there's a sense that Child - with Cruise as Reacher in the back of his mind - has become distracted when writing these latest books. They have lost something.
Reacher now seems somewhat diminished; yes, there remain references to his height in the later stories, such as his need to move the front seat all the way to the back when he gets into a car to drive. But the fights and showdowns are no longer battles where his physique and cocky demeanour are enough to intimidate his opponents.
Child's best books in the series have been the ones that strayed from the tired formula of the loner cleaning up small-town corruption - particularly those that have seen Reacher back in uniform, as a detective trying to solve murders. That might be one welcome route back to revive the Reacher aura.
Yet with the character now 54 - and Child suggesting in articles that the series will end with Reacher meeting a bloody end before he gets too old - perhaps we should just be grateful that he's still around for us to savour him headbutting a few more bad guys.
thereview@scmp.com


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LIFE

Book review: Personal, by Lee Child

Lifestyle

Culture

Books

The latest novel in the Jack Reacher action series has fallen short, writes Guy Haydon. Is actor Tom Cruise to blame?


British-born author Lee Child and his big, brawny hero Jack Reacher - a former US military policeman turned wanderer who metes out brutal justice to bad guys wherever he travels - both seem to have lost their way. Again.
