The best thing I ever read about Jack Reacher – and I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before – is that the hero of Lee Child’s books doesn’t solve crimes or right wrongs. What he does is kill the plot. The plot comes at him in the form of baddies and deadly set-pieces and locked doors, and he just punches and shoots a way through it until there’s nothing left.
I got that from Andy Martin’s book, Reacher Said Nothing, about a year the academic spent watching Lee Child as he wrote. Warning: it’s a book that really ruined Jack Reacher for me. Not least because since then, I’ve seen the wandering hero as a kind of vacuum cleaner for crime. He moves back and forth over the carpet of the text, vacuuming up bad people. And when there are no bad people left, he’s presumably unplugged and stacked politely in the utility room.
Now. Just typing that I realise afresh that there are lots of similarities between Reacher and the main character from the Doom games. When I read the Reacher books for the first time I think I even pictured Reacher looking a bit like that health portrait of the Doom Guy, as we called him, from the really early games: the thick neck, the massive jaw, the no-nonsense hair, so sculpted and unyielding that it can probably deflect bullets. The deepest similarity is that the Doom Slayer, as we now call him, kills everything in the game. A new level arrives. It’s full of stuff. By the end of it, it’s empty of stuff. You’re killing stuff, but step back and you’re also kind of tidying. It’s odd to frame it this way. I don’t often think of Jack Reacher and Doom as being fictional implementations of Marie Kondo’s work – but they sort of are?
The vacuum looms large in all this. Playing through Doom: The Dark Ages again yesterday on a fresh runthrough and with some adjusted settings, I was surprised by how similar it felt to tidying up. It feels more like tidying up than something like A Little to the Left, which is explicitly about tidying up. But those adjusted settings are important here: to get the most out of a tidy, you don’t just bust out the vacuum cleaner. You want to clean out the nozzles and remove any stuff that’s wrapped itself around the cylinder. Equally, if you want Doom: The Dark Ages not at its best, but at its closest to the act of vacuuming – I appreciate that is a weird thing to think/type/construct an article around – you want to go into the menus and tweak a bit.