In some respects Reacher (that's how he likes to be known) resembles another popular character, Harry Bosch, author Michael Connelly’s solve-all-cases-type detective.

At their respective author's bidding, both these figures have leapt from novel to novel over the years, each bringing conclusion to cases that no one else would be capable of resolving.  Heroes indeed!

There are, however, significant differences between Harry Bosch and Reacher.  Harry Bosch, always successful while employing dubiously ethical means, is a character who is able to experience the usual range of human joys and sorrows.  Reacher, on the other hand, is largely invulnerable, except for a few cuts and bruises sustained from time to time.  

Reacher is a wanderer, isolated and disconnected, slipping in and out of the shadows as easily as he makes and breaks relationships with the women in his life.  Jack will have at least one relationship with an acquaintance during the course of a novel, but by story's end he is admitting to himself (now that the relationship must end) that he will miss her, but only  "…for a while".

Reacher, more than he knows, is thoroughly defined by his redemptive task in the world: he defeats evil (i.e. evil people) by sheer physical strength and skill with his weapons.  But he himself is unaware of how close he comes to personifying the very evil that he wants to spare the rest of us.

For a redeemer, there is very little that redeems him.  His body is a smoothly operational weapon just like the firearms he knows and trusts so much.  In fact, he is essentially the "mechanised man", more machine than a feeling human being.

I find it intriguing that such a metallic, mechanical, "rid the world of evil" character is so popular, even if it is that he figures in the entertainment section of modern literary fiction.  Would the millions of us who read his adventures rather like him to intervene where we feel perplexed, overwhelmed even, by the anxieties and demons encountered in our real-time existence?

In our counselling we seek another way.  We seek to engage with what perplexes us and begin to learn, even if cautiously, that the part of us that wants to eliminate and dominate is, as it were, the "troublemaker".  In other words, Reacher (and his like), although looking like our Knight in Shining Armour, is really only the hollowed-out character that remains after we have sent the more humble parts of ourselves into exile.

I consider that J.R.R.Tolkien (author of "The Lord of the Rings") can talk to us as eloquently as any regarding our modern fascination with "fast-food redemption".  In his preface to the second edition of The Silmarillion, he explains that all of his work in concerned in some way with "the two magics", one good, one sinister.  He claims that the sinister magic is technology too slavishly deployed, and that we avoid noticing that modernity threatens to be the triumph of this sort of magic.  Jack Reacher is surely the epitome of "technological man" - reduced to a single (economic) purpose, inscrutable, untouchable, un-reach-able.

The "good" magic, suggests Tolkien, is really our artistic sense, by which we are able to approach and hear the original musical beauty of what surrounds us.  Where people and objects are approached in this way, we begin to appreciate that they have an inexhaustible value, although for this appreciation to be sustained, we need to be willing not to translate or reduce this value to anything less than itself, in an attempt (falsely conceived) to take repeatable control of it.

It is of course, more than slightly unfair to contrast the literature of a Tolkien with that of a Lee Child.  Lee Child's novels are intended for the mass entertainment market, and are here today and probably gone tomorrow.  That’s OK as long as I don’t allow the mass market to have its way with me, that is, have the greatest say in who I am.  If (or when) I do, I fancy I am likely to be no more substantial than a Jack Reacher.