This post originally appeared in Douglas Gover's internet literary magazine
Numero Cinq: http://numerocinqmagazine.com/
1.
I have always been
drawn to stories of escape; not just simple escapism but actual escape.
At the age of ten, I obsessed over World War II prisoner of war
literature. I may have been the only sixth-grader in the audience for The Great Escape,
John Sturges’ stirring adaptation of Paul Brickhill’s memoir of the
break-out from Stalag Luft Three, who sat squinting critically at the
screen making an inventory of trivial inaccuracies: The living
conditions were worse than the film portrayed; the ambitions of the
escape team, more modest. And the POW camp, intended to gather all the
allied escape artists in one place, was actually Colditz Castle, a
one-time mental institution in the town of Colditz, near Leipzig.
The claustrophobic
tunnel digger was not the heroic Pole played by Charles Bronson but Paul
Brickhill himself, and unlike Bronson’s Danny, he was ultimately banned
from participating in the escape, which may have saved his life.
I’ve seen The Great Escape
many times since that rainy afternoon in 1963, first in revival
theaters and when it became possible I purchased it on every known
format: Betamax, VHS, RCA video disk, DVD, Blu-ray, and finally, the
digital download. I watch it to the end whenever I chance upon it,
clicking through the channels on my TV. I’ve even rented it on Netflix.
The thing that keeps
drawing me back is the way the film expands in the final third, from the
airless prison stockades and dark tunnels into the open rolling fields,
quaint towns and snow-capped mountains of Bavaria.
Richard Attenborough
fleeing across the roofs of a sleepy village; Charles Bronson floating
down a placid river to the sea on a stolen rowboat; James Coburn
following a French Resistance fighter into the sun-dappled foothills of
the Pyrenees, heading for Spain; and of course, most of all, best of
all, Steve McQueen tearing across an alpine meadow on a hi-jacked Nazi
motorcycle, finally attempting to leap a wall of crossed timbers and
barbed wire in an exuberant, gloriously futile bid for freedom. Those
images captured everything I longed for as a child.
But why should that
be? I was a cheerful, cherubic little boy living a pampered life in a
great city. I had a loving mother, a glamorous father, my own dog, my
own record player, my own room. And yet I loved to imagine that the
six-foot, ornate dark wood-framed mirror hanging in that room was in
fact a secret door to – where? Someplace more exciting, more mysterious,
more free.
I happily followed
the Pevensie children through that wardrobe into Narnia and could have
jumped directly into the television every Easter when we watched the
annual showing of The Wizard of Oz on CBS. It didn’t matter that all we had was a black-and-white TV.
I provided the color.
Looking back, I
realize I was frightened most of the time growing up, afraid of looking
foolish or clumsy, cowering at the thought of bullies at school and on
my block at home, trying to avoid stern teachers and arrogant camp
counselors. The city itself made me nervous. I never explored it until I
returned as an adult, after college. I never even visited Greenwich
Village until tenth grade when I found a friend who happened to live
there. I attended one of the best high schools in the Western
Hemisphere, but I was too intimidated to take the most interesting
classes Dalton offered. I still regret missing Donald Barr’s Shakespeare
seminar and the great Jane Bendetson’s “The Bible as Literature”
elective.
The Los Angeles side
of my own family frankly terrified me but with good reason: drug addled,
bizarrely seductive half-sister, sociopathic step-brother (did he
really try to drown me in the swimming pool that day? Or was he just
‘fooling around?’), authentically demonic step-mother (“I would gladly
see all of you LAYED OUT DEAD if it meant helping your father IN ANY
WAY.”) and of course my brilliant, troubled, phobic, mercurial,
unknowable father.
Fear itself is
corrosive. My father understood that as well as FDR did, and I knew it,
too. That’s why I spent so much time in my early adulthood confronting
mean people, flying kamikaze seductions at women far out of my league
and surfing waves too big for me. I got defeated, dumped and nearly
drowned. I won an argument or two, went on some wild dates, caught some
extraordinary waves. But none of that changed anything.
I still wanted to escape — to
the Yellow Brick Road with a motley crew of impaired friends, to the
city of Helium under the hurtling moons of Barsoom with Dejah Thoris;
down the Mississippi on a raft with Nigger Jim. Maybe I just wanted to
stake my freehold in the unclaimed territories of the imagination. I’ve
always felt more comfortable with stories than with real life, anyway –
they’re so much better organized.
My adult reading
remains tinged with that longing for other lives and alternate worlds,
from Mann’s Zauberberg to Hemingway’s Pamplona, From Michael Chabon’s
Sitka, Alaska to (perversely, I know) George Orwell’s Airstrip One.
2.
Perry’s first novel, The Butcher’s Boy,
came out in 1982 and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel a year
later. He hasn’t made much of a splash since then, partly because his
books have never been made into films. He advanced a theory about why
this might be during a 2003 exchange with Roger Birnbaum:
TP: In a way I don’t really think about it much anymore. My first book, The Butcher’s Boy,
was in option continuously for 18 years. It was never out of option.
There are studios that don’t exist anymore that had these things. At
some point every working screenwriter in Hollywood has a bad script for
one or another of my books. Which is why they all hate me. So, I don’t
know.
RB: I’m not seeing the connection. They write bad scripts and they hate you?
TP: These are people
who have written good movies. And they are hired to write a script of
one of my books and it just doesn’t work out. It’s partly an obvious
problem. Most of my main characters spend most of their time alone. And
when they are not alone, whatever they say aloud is a lie. So, it’s
confusing and very difficult to make a movie out of that. You have to
invent some bogus character who is going to be the interlocutor. That’s
one thing. And very often you have to soften the protagonist because he
is amoral or something. Or has some other minor drawback.
I’m convinced there’s a different explanation.
Perry’s books resist
adaptation for the same reason that many books do: their literary
quality is simply not translatable to the medium of film. Thomas Perry
writes escapist fiction. I’m sure he’d be amused to hear me accuse him
of making literature. And yet, in his small and particular way, that is
precisely what he does. The one thing that all the books I take
seriously have in common is a feeling in the text of the author’s
personality and point of view, his unique slant on the events he’s describing his sensibility.
That ought to be the
explanation, at least, since the books move through one extraordinary
cinematic set-piece after another. The chase across the roofs in The Face Changers, the escape through deep woods in Shadow Woman where
Jane uses every trick from her Seneca heritage to hide her trail, not
knowing that a pair of dogs are trampling her cunning diversions guided
by her scent alone. When she stumbles into a clearing, exhausted and
hopeless, and finds herself face to face with a giant brown bear she
turns this final calamity into her salvation. She distracts the huge
beast with the last of her food and lets the dogs rush headlong into the
bear in an improvised Darwinian ambush that covers her escape. I’d
watch that in a movie: relentless pursuit foiled by improvisation and
ingenuity.
Of course you know
Jane will always win, whether she’s leading a trio of murderous
sociopaths through the bowels of a deserted rust-belt factory or
ambushing a platoon of killers in a deserted country house in the North
Woods. That’s the brown savory crust on the macaroni and cheese of this
narrative comfort food, the thing people both love and despise about
genre fiction in general: Kenzie and Gennaro, Elvis Cole and Spenser
will always figure things out; Bubba Rugowski, Joe Pike and Hawk will
always get there in the nick of time.
And somehow, the phrase “nick of time” will always be apposite.
So, yes, Jane will
always ferry her charges to safety but this sets her apart from the
other heroes and heroines on the thriller shelf. She’s not trying to
steal anything or solve anything; she’s just trying to help.
Plus she’s cool. She
can run forever and she knows where to get false documents. She can tell
you that a second floor apartment is best for fugitives (you can see
people coming but still climb down to the street); she can teach you to
memorize the escape routes from any town and how to destroy the
fingerprints and DNA evidence in a car with a fire extinguisher.
Also, she’s fearless. At one point in the 6th book, Runner,
she spins her car 180 degrees and drives straight at her pursuers,
running them off the road. “You can’t play chicken like that!” her
panicky passenger screams. But her bravado is based on ruthless
calculation: They’re running for their lives – the mercenaries in the
other car are chasing them for cash, and no one’s going to die for a
dollar.
Dance for the Dead,
perhaps the best of the books, opens with Jane fighting her way into a
Los Angeles Court House with nine-year-old Timothy Phillips so that the
boy can prove he’s alive before the sinister financial holding company
Hoffen-Bayne can declare him dead and take control of his inherited
fortune. After a dramatic scene in the courtroom, the judge asks to see
Jane in his chambers. “I hear you’re one of those people who could kill
me with a pencil,” he says. Jane answers simply: “If I am, I wouldn’t
need a pencil.”
To give a better
sense of who Jane is and why I find her so compelling, I’m going to turn
over some page space to her and present the revealing final moments of
her talk with Judge Kramer.
Wrapping up their post-mortem, Jane says:
“ … I can’t prove
any of it. I only saw the police putting handcuffs on four of the men in
the courthouse, and there won’t be anything on paper that connects them
with Hoffen-Bayne or anybody else. I know I never saw them before, so I
can’t have been the one they recognized. They saw Timmy.” She took a
step toward the door. “Keep him safe.”
The Judge said, “Then there’s you.” He watched her stop and face him. “Who are you?”
“Jane Whitefield.”
“I mean what’s your interest in this?”
“Dennis Morgan asked me to keep Timmy alive. I did that. We all did that.”
“What are you? A private detective? A bodyguard?”
“I’m a guide.”
“What kind of guide?”
“I show people how to go from places where someone is trying to kill them to other places where nobody is.”
“What sort of pay do you get for that?”
“Sometimes they give me presents. I declare the presents on my income taxes. There’s a line for that.”
“Did somebody give you a present for this job?”
“If you fail,
there’s nobody around to be grateful. My clients are dead.” After a
second she added, “I don‘t take money from kids, even rich kids.”
“Have you served in your capacity as ‘guide’ for Dennis Morgan before?”
“Never met him until he called. He was a friend of a friend.”
“You – all three of you – went into this knowing that whoever was near that little boy might be murdered.”
She looked at him as
though she were trying to decide whether he was intelligent or not.
Finally, she said, “An innocent little boy is going to die. You’re
either somebody who will help him or somebody who won’t. For the rest of
your life you’ll be somebody who did help him or somebody who didn’t.”
So that’s Jane
Whitefield: one-woman witness-protection agency. As she concludes about
Pete Hatcher, a client on the run from mobsters who own the gambling
casino where he works, “The way he would defeat his enemies was to
outlast them. While they were staring at computer screens or loitering
late at night in airport baggage areas or sitting in cars outside hotels
at check-out time studying each male who came out the door, he had to
be somewhere, living a normal, reasonably contented life. If he could do
that for long enough, they would give up.” (Shadow Woman)
Perry weaves Jane’s
Indian heritage into the fabric of every story, as in this moment as she
is about to go to the aid of a small orphan boy in mortal danger from
criminal financial predators trying to steal his inherited fortune. Jane
has just received a ‘present’ from a previous client named Rhonda
Eckerly – Jane never accepts formal payment for her work. The two
hundred thousand dollars will come in handy for the task ahead:
As she locked her
door and took a last look at her house, she thought about the old days,
when Senecas went out regularly to raid the tribes in the south and west
in parties as small as three or four warriors. After a fight they would
run back along the trail through the great forest, sometimes not
stopping for two days and nights.
When they made it
back to Nundawaonoga, they would approach their village and give a
special shout to the people to tell them what it was they would be
celebrating. (Dance for the Dead)
As Perry said in an interview several years ago,
…one
of the things that having a Seneca as my heroine does is give me a way
to show the area in several dimensions: the modern place we see, the
historical place where armies clashed in deep forests, the mythical
place, where deities and supernatural creatures live. The roads in that
part of the country are simply Iroquois trails paved over, or short-cuts
made by the British Army to connect their forts.
Despite her Ivy
League education and upper middle class lifestyle, Jane remains a Long
House Seneca at heart. But she is caught between two worlds and the
binary nature of reality figures prominently in Seneca lore, as well.
Two brothers, Hawenneyu the creator and Hanegoategeh the destroyer,
struggle over the world, fighting each other at every turn:
Hawenneyu makes a
little boy. Hanegoategeh gives him a virus. Hawenneyu strengthens his
body to give him immunity, and Hanegoategeh makes the virus mutate and
sends the boy off to kill eighty thousand people. Hawenneyu has made
sure that one of the eighty thousand is a man who would have started a
war and killed eighty million. (Blood Money)
Jane is exigent and unsentimental, ruthlessly clear in her judgments, sharply articulate in expressing them … rather like Perry himself. The
astringent perceptions speckle the books and touch you as you read like
summer rain on your face. Of a silent woman in a county lock-up he
remarks, “She never spoke to anyone, having long ago lost interest in
what other people gained from listening, and having gotten used to
whatever they expelled by talking.” (Dance for the Dead)
Hiding out at the University of Michigan, the 28-year-old guide makes
this unflinching assessment of herself: “There were places where she
could still pass as a college girl, but college was not one of them.” (Dance for the Dead)
Of her own husband, a successful surgeon, she notes, “Carey was very
good at constructing fair, logical solutions to other people’s
problems.” (The Face Changers) Of the three urban
gang-bangers she entices to help her follow an escaping villain, Jane
thinks, “The part about killing seemed to have raised their level of
interest considerably. She had forgotten for a moment about seventeen
year old boys. There had never been a moment in human history when
anybody hadn’t been able to recruit enough of them for a war.” (Dance for the Dead)
3.
In Poison Flower,
Jane Whitefield confronts some of the logical consequences of her
Quixotic profession: these windmills fight back. Every person she has
rescued over the years has someone still hunting for them, and these
hunters are ruthless persistent criminals, organized or not. Jane has
always known she might be captured by one of them and tortured to reveal
a location of the victims she’s rescued. Like the Seneca scouts left
behind to assure the escape of a raiding party, she has always been
willing to sacrifice herself for her tribe.
Poison Flower puts this determination to the test.
Jane helps a man
named named James Shelby escape from jail in Los Angeles. Shelby’s
sister had found Jane in Deganawida and convinced her that Shelby had
been framed for murder. No one else was willing or able to help.
Jane gets the man out
of jail but she is shot and captured in the process. Her captors begin
what our government calls “enhanced interrogation” (unless some other
government is doing it) but stop hastily when they realize Jane has more
to offer than the location of a single runner. A little research
identifies her as a valuable commodity, and soon she’s on the auction
block, with every abusive husband, sociopath and career criminal she
ever defeated bidding for the right to extract her secrets.
She escapes – the
thugs are more worried about someone stealing her before the auction and
make the blunder of underestimating a slim, unarmed, badly wounded
woman.
With no
identification, no money and no cell-phone, some stolen clothes, a
thug’s gun and a pair of bolt cutters that were meant to be used on her
own fingers and toes, Jane steals a van and winds up several hundred
miles away, at a battered women’s shelter in Las Vegas. She knows the
staff there will help a woman in her condition with no questions,
judgments or demands.
It’s typical of Jane
that she acquires a runner, even as she is on the run herself,
protecting one of the women at the shelter from the abusive husband who
has tracked her down. The last thing he expects, when he breaks into the
place, is a moment like this:
Jane swung her good
leg to the floor, stood up beside the bed and aimed her gun at him with
both hands. “I know you can probably scare her into saying something she
doesn’t want to. Now I want you to take a long, careful look at me. If
you think I haven’t fired a gun into a man before, or that I even have a
slight reluctance to do it again right now, then go ahead. Try to get
to me.”
He does, and she
shoots him. But it’s not a fatal shot, and as Jane flees the shelter,
the hunted wife begs to join her. The woman knows that as long as her
husband is alive he’ll keep trying to find her. This is not a request
Jane is constructed to refuse.
Once she connects
with Shelby the next concern is getting his sister to safety. She’s the
obvious next victim. They’re almost too late in attempting to rescue
her, and Jane is captured again. The auction is on. Once more she
escapes, aided in part by the razor blade taped to her instep but mainly
by the greedy ruthless violence of the bidders themselves. They all
bring cash to the auction and the temptation of those sacks of money
proves too great. The civilized Sotheby’s façade soon disintegrates into
total warfare and Jane spirits Shelby’s sister away in the firefight.
With her charges
safe, the task should be complete, but now a lifetime’s worth of very
bad people are hunting her, so Jane takes the initiative and goes to
war. Of course the outcome is preordained, predictable as the next
Godiva chocolate. One might say, as nutritious as the next Godiva
chocolate as well, and this installment — more violent and plot-driven
than any of the others –makes you hungry for the steamed fish and
arugula salad of a more demanding literature. As such it may be the
perfect book to ease yourself out of Jane Whitefield’s world into Jane
Austen’s, or Jhumpa Lahiri’s.
Of course, Perry
isn’t the equal of those women. But he has something in common with them
that his colleagues can’t claim: he makes a particular sound, he owns a
particular tone of voice, and you keep the compassionate asperity of
that voice with you long after the details of chase and pursuit are
forgotten.
4.
So if it’s my own
stubborn fears that draw me to Jane Whitefield, the question persists:
where do those fears come from? That’s what I’ve been wondering since I
finished Poison Flower.
It might be genetic –
my father was a quivering mass of phobias: narrow spaces, open spaces,
enclosed spaces … space in general terrified him. In his later years he
refused to fly because of a toxic Long Island iced tea of debilitating
terrors: agoraphobia, claustrophobia, vertigo – too anxious to fly
without a stiff drink and too shy to ask for one. That’s the “Nature”
side of the debate; on the Nurture side we have the fact of his leaving
my mother when I was six months old. Of course I was too young to
register his absence, but reliable sources tell me that my mother was a
broken-hearted unstable mess for more than a year after his departure.
That could throw a good scare into the average toddler. And that’s the
main reason I didn’t leave for California when I got the offer of agency
representation and a career writing television sitcoms. My son Nick was
nine years old and teetering a little at that point. His father
lighting out for the territories would have knocked him over decisively.
So I didn’t follow
the fantasy and I didn’t escape my life. I stayed home and raised my
kids instead. I may have settled the nature-nurture debate, at least
within my own family, since both kids are cheerfully indomitable and
fearless. Tellingly. Nick has never shown the slightest interest in
works of fantasy. He prefers history; he reads Robert A. Caro, not
Robert A. Heinlein, and his “Glory Road” was I-95 South. He’s living in
Washington D.C. now, working for the World Wildlife Fund.
He loves The Great Escape
though, especially that iconic image of Steve McQueen in flight,
leaping for freedom, knowing he’s going to land defeated in a tangle of
barbed wire and eternally not giving a shit. And perhaps it’s just
because of him and his sister Caity, fighting on the barricades of
bureaucracy struggling to help the infected and the afflicted in the
halfway houses of Boston, that I have found a rare contentment on this
tiny island thirty miles off the coast of Massachusetts. I don’t require
the skill and ingenuity of a Jane Whitefield, I no longer yearn to
vanish, jump the boat and drive off into a new life.
But I still love Jane
Whitefield, and I still feel the delinquent thrill when a new book of
her adventures comes out. Like many of her old clients, settled in their
new lives, far from danger or pursuit, I might not need Jane Whitefield
any more. But it’s nice to know she’s there.
