Nothing to Lose (Jack Reacher, No. 12)
by Lee Child
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Book Reviews of Nothing to Lose (Jack Reacher, No. 12)
Book Review: Another unhinged atheist rant
Summary: 1 Stars
It's always a bad sign when the author has to name towns Hope and Despair. That means the book is "symbolic" and "meaningful" somehow. And you'd be right.
Reacher stops Thurman, a "born-again Christian" and "businessman" from starting WW3. You see, born-again Christians want to start WW3 by killing lots of people so that Christ will return. And breeding red cows. Not Anglicans, though, because (as an Anglican character explains) Anglicans don't believe the Book of the Revelation is trustworthy - let alone the Bible itself. So it's not like Reacher hates all Christians - just the ones that believe in the Bible.
In this book, Child inexplicably paints Reacher as a "village atheist" - one who fancies himself a skeptic, but hasn't really thought about the issues too deeply. Child strangely ridicules Reacher as one of those who judges others like Thurman for being evil and hypocritical but is himself a hypocrite for judging Thurman in the first place, imposing his own moral preferences on Thurman - just as he complains Thurman does to him.
Why are they nothing more than preferences? Because, as one atheist philosopher has said, without God, all moralities are meaningless - "the words remain, but the meaning is gone." Without God as an external moral standard, Reacher's distaste for Thurman's misdeeds are nothing more than that - distaste, as one might prefer not to eat celery. We are fortunate that in this book Reacher does not simply prefer to kill Jews and gypsies and homosexuals in great numbers, as one famous Darwinist did not too long ago.
Yet he acts as if his morality applies to all people. Reacher has a Christian sense of justice, yet is wholly ignorant of that fact as he tosses around infantile objections to God as if they were not two thousand years obsolete.
Reacher also accuses the USA of deploying uranium shells against civilians and covering it up, and sympathizes with deserters, helping one to escape, again claiming the supposed moral high ground.
Why is this all so upsetting? Because, like most of the 1-star reviewers, I've read his other books, and it's sad to see what has happened. Someone we thought of as smart (well, actually, that image began to crumble in that book where he says the Vietnam war was the "wrong war, wrong time" - he seemed to have forgotten the millions killed by atheist, anti-Christian governments) is, in this book, spouting beliefs that are uninformed and puerile.
Child seems to have tired of Reacher as a character and is trying to get his fans to cheer as he is ignominiously dispatched in the near future, maybe setting him up for an early death involving cotton wads and a Dan Rather Clown Suit in the next book.
Book Review: Meandering, dull, lacks any spark
Summary: 2 Stars
Anyone who's read one of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels knows what to expect: Jack Reacher, drifter and almost anti-hero, who has rejected just about everything related to normal life and wanders from place to place seemingly aimlessly but usually with a logic that makes sense only to him, stumbling upon some problem or injustice or just something that intrigues him... and we're into another twisty, edge-of-the-seat thriller. For the most part, I've found the Reacher novels entertaining enough to get me over my usual dislike of macho heroes and action thrillers.
Not so with this book. For the first time, the plot is slow and meandering, just like Reacher's seventeen-mile walks from Hope to Despair. I think, honestly, readers travelled that change of emotions with him, gradually coming to despair of any decent story coming out of these 500+-pages of dreariness. For the first time, the edge-of-the-seat tension is missing. I kept waiting for the twists, the shock revelations, the 'why didn't I see that coming'... but it simply wasn't there. Just yet more backwards and forwards journeys to Despair - a town that did not want Reacher around - and endless watching empty roads for hours on end.
Even the revelations, when they finally came, were unconvincing. If the owner of Despair's factory is so all-controlling, how could anyone be using the place as a dispatch centre for deserters? And even thirty seconds' Googling would have told Child that Canada does NOT offer asylum to US military deserters. Second, the factory being used as a processing centre for plutonium, and the alleged plot with the plutonium, sounded very far-fetched; the motivation was unconvincing and with such thin evidence offered in support left me shaking my head in disbelief.
Finally, while I'm getting used to Reacher picking up, using and then discarding convenient women in these books, his patronising and controlling behaviour in this particular instalment was close to offensive. What right does he have to tell Vaughan - whose first name we don't even learn - how she should feel about sleeping with him?
I hope the next instalment in the Reacher series is better, otherwise this may be the end of the road for me and Jack Reacher will be permanently consigned to Despair.
Book Review: Child Tweaks the "Chickenhawk Dittoheads"
Summary: 4 Stars
After reading the novel (which I found reasonably entertaining) I decided to peruse other Child entries when I discovered two oddities about "Nothing to Lose":
1. the dismally low customer rating and
2. the sheer number of customer reviews (372 - 154 of them one star) compared with Child's other novels (next highest: "Killing Floor" with 207)
What happened? Skim the one star reviews and enjoy as certain readers object to:
o "Reacher's...criticism of the war"
o "Child [espousing] his anti-Iraq War, anti-administration views"
o "[an] anti-military left wing rant"
o "[his] crusade against conservative Protestants and American military efforts of the past sixty years"
o "[a book that is] Anti-Christian, Anti-War and Anti-American"
o "[an] old, tiresome target-- the mythical right-wing preacher...Instead of depicting those villains who really want to strike at the heart of our country--Islamic militants"
...and so on. One reader's attitude sums most of them up:
o "Keep you [sic] political viewpoints to yourself, and just entertain us."
Test yourself. Do you find the following passages "offensive" or problematic?
o "We're all atheists. You don't believe in Zeus or Thor or Neptune or Augustus Caesar or Mars or Venus or Sun Ra. You reject a thousand gods. Why should it bother you if someone else rejects a thousand and one?" (412)
o "...duty is a transaction...It's a two-way street. We owe them, they owe us. And what they owe us is a solemn promise to risk our lives and limbs if and only if there's a damn good reason...And that's all gone now." (460)
If your hackles haven't been raised, than you might enjoy what else the book offers:
1. Action begins early.
2. Crisply written action sequences (highlights: Reacher trapped by two patrol cars and a six-on-one bar fight).
3. Some great tough-guy dialogue.
4. Decent mysteries: a death in the desert, an aggressively secretive small town, nighttime flights, unusual military facility, strange illnesses
5. A hard-to-pin-down antagonist (who even pulls one over on Reacher)
6. Topical issues: domestic terrorism, religious fundamentalism, VA hospital problems, disillusioned soldiers
Book Review: Good, but with a rushed ending that left me unsatisfied.
Summary: 3 Stars
I love the Jack Reacher books. Not all of them are "great," but I know each one is going to be a "good read." There are a lot of knee-jerk reviews here which are trashing this book because a) Reacher admits to being an atheist (duh, did the pragmatic Reacher ever seem like a guy who'd have an imaginary friend?) and b) Reacher dares to question whether the Iraq war was fought for the right reasons (again, duh, we've always known that Reacher was capable of his own independent thoughts). It seems that reviewers who are offended by the depiction of the crazy End Times cult have conveniently failed to notice that Child also included a "good" preacher as contrast: the intelligent and kind-hearted preacher who helps Reacher when he's stranded on the side of the road. And the reviewers who are offended by Reacher's supposedly anti-war views have conveniently failed to notice that Reacher never said ALL wars were bad -- just ones that are fought for the wrong reasons, and in his opinion (he IS allowed to have informed opinions and independent thoughts, I hope?), the Iraq War is not a good war. Not everyone is going to agree with his thoughts on that subject, but how embarrassingly closed-minded would a reader have to be, to put down a book just because its protagonist has a thought or opinion the reader doesn't agree with? Apparently some of the Amazon reviewers are very closed-minded indeed!
The reason I gave the book a middling rating is entirely due to its ending. I won't give away any spoilers, but I thought the book ended so abruptly I actually went back and re-read the climax to see if I had accidently skipped something. While it's fine to "cut to the chase" in an action/thriller, I'd rather a writer didn't "cut to the denouement" during the climax! Oh, well, there was still a lot of good mystery in this book, and quite a few suspenseful and nail-biting scenes. I probably would have given this book three and a half stars if such a rating were permitted. Maybe four stars, if it were by a different writer. Child's biggest problem is that he's set the bar so high, with so many strong books, that it's hard for every single one to live up to fans' expectations.
Book Review: A Little too Bleak for My Tastes
Summary: 3 Stars
This is an moderately entertaining book that lacks the depth and heart needed to fully engage the reader. The plot is reasonably well developed, and the sparse prose style is often engaging and well suited to the story, particularly in the first third of the book. I nevertheless found the novel disheartening in its depiction of a bleak world as told from the point of view of an exceedingly depressed and world weary protagonist.
If all you want it is a story that well help to pass the time, then I think this book will meet your needs. The author began to try my patience, however, by developing an endless series of long, drawn-out action sequences described with the dry accuracy that one might use to record the workings of a watch. There is little in the way of character development. The author provides an excellent and highly detailed description of the "chess board" on which the action takes place. I could easily envision the hundreds of square miles in the rolling hills and barren plains outside Colorado Springs, Colorado where the action takes place. I wasn't really bored reading the detailed descriptions of how the protagonist moved over this playing field, but at the same time I was not really engaged either.
This book takes place in a cold unemotional place where there is little hope, and little reason for joy. That's fine as a philosophical position, but it is not really my idea of great escapist fiction. The author seems to have no abiding faith in humanity. I respect his right and his obvious talent for presenting his vision of such a dreary and heartless world, but it is hard for me to get excited about it. I think the pseudonymous Richard Stark did this kind of thing with considerably more aplomb.
This is my second Lee Child book, and despite my disappointment in this volume, I am likely to read more in this series. I enjoyed my first Reacher book, "Bad Luck and Trouble," quite a bit more than I enjoyed this one. For now, I'll assume that "Nothing to Lose" was simply a misfire, and after a time I'll try another in the series and see if I find it more satisfying.