The Chain (2019 novel by Adrian McKinty)

 

The Chain (2019 novel by Adrian McKinty)

 

Everywhere there are dangers and everywhere we see our own vulnerabilities. We generally push those thoughts aside because our vulnerabilities are embedded in our ability to function in our society; we can’t worry too much about nefarious internet Data-Miners because we rely so much on those same communications mediums to feel part of the world, and we can’t live in constant fear of our children being kidnapped because that fear would distort our children badly.

 

Often our only defense from sheer, stark, soul-crippling, terror seems complacency, but that complacency is itself a vulnerability. To avoid madness, we vicariously embrace our wildest fears. We are rational people, not like those embracing Satanic Panic, Pizzagate, Qanon, and other witch-hunt-breed conspiracy masturbations, but still love to decompress through pulp/popular fictions. Yes, unfortunately, these fictions feed the fears of the Satanic Panic et all, but in the conversation, I refuse to refer to those guys as “we.”

 

Fears faced vicariously prefer improbable entertainments over realistic examination, True-Crime about Cyber-Criminals and Child Abduction aren’t really that much fun, reality is dreary, while a well-constructed puzzle and an against-all-odds heroic win are the opposite. Within fear-based entrainments there’s a recently emerged trope arguing that that the most vulnerable demographic in the USA are women like this novel's Heroine, Rachael Klien O’Neill, the white, well-educated, petite-bourgeoisie, Soccer Mom; a woman familiar with pain but still holding onto a positive outlook, responsible concerning her child, but financially struggling in the wake of her divorce. Every bad guy in the universe seems out to get her, not because it reflects actual crime demographics, but because so large of an audience can identify with her (not for nothing, this book’s author is a dude).

 

This is a story wherein class-privilege provides little safety, in fact, makes Rachael the preferred target, a desperate refugee once the veneer of our civilization is torn asunder. It requires exceptional Villains because Police do respond to the call of Soccer Moms and act forcefully in cases of “Stranger Danger.” In the Real-World, those who fall victim were generally marginalized to start with, and victimized by Evils that were in plain sight long before striking.

 

First sentence of “The Chain” reads, “She’s sitting at the bus stop checking the likes on her Instagram feed and doesn’t even notice the man with the gun until he’s almost next to her.” This is quickly followed by, “Her mind races. She knows she shouldn’t have gotten into the vehicle. That’s how girls vanish.”

  

The “she” is Kylie O’Neill, daughter of Rachael. Even helpless, Kylie takes the time to worry about how much mother, who is everything I described above plus a cancer survivor, will worry about her, and that's a hell of a hook.

 

The adversaries of the mother or daughter are strangers to them. Rachael’s idiot ex-husband is an innocent here, but also useless in time of need. Rachael and Kylie were chosen by Criminal Masterminds who have insolated themselves perfectly behind technology and those they’d previously terrorized into submission. The Masterminds’ minions are sometimes brutal, but are all, like the man with the gun mentioned above, were the Masterminds' Victims first.

 

And the Masterminds’ game?

 

After Rachael is informed that her child has been kidnapped there are a number of things she must do to get her baby back. She must pay a ransom that the Villains carefully calculated against her financial capacity to pay, and then kidnap somebody else’s child for the next ransom, and do some other criminal favors. The Masterminds never get their hands dirty, and Rachael can’t call for help -- not only because of the threat of death, but because all evidence implicates her, not them. As Racheal is told over the phone, “1. You’re not the first one, nor the last one. 2. Money doesn’t matter. Only the Chain does … You’re in The Chain now, Rachel. We both are. And The Chain is going to protect itself. So, first thing is no cops. If you ever talk to a cop, the people who run The Chain will know and they’ll tell me to kill Kylie and pick a different target, and I will. They don’t care about you or your family; all they care about is the security of The Chain.”

 

The Masterminds convincingly convey omniscience, assuring her silence and cooperation. They even have a form of semi-omniscience as they are well-resourced, careful researchers, planners, observers, highly skilled and experienced. They select their targets through social media activity, like bragging about your kid on a Facebook page, and utilizing actuary tables and statistical models better than any Political Campaign Strategist.

 

The book demonstrates our social media vulnerabilities with such detailed conviction it'll make you toy with embracing an off-the-grid lifestyle. As the cover-blub reads, “Nothing short of Jaws for parents.”

 

The novel is divided into two parts, but really this a three-act drama, the second and third acts imbedded in each other.

 

In the first act, Racheal is trying to save Kylie with too few allies and forced to demean herself at every turn. The person Rachael finally turns to Pete, her former brother-in-law and ex-Marine, with all the martial skills one would expect; in a different book he’d be the Hero, a Jack-Reacher-type character, but here Pete’s no Superhero and his human weaknesses and secrets that inhibit him from being the man Rachael needs him to be. When Pete fails to be Rachael’s Knight in Shining Armor, she can only rely on herself.

One of the Villains, Ginny, takes the time to teach Racheal how to do bad things, constantly insisting that she’s strong enough, and a good enough mother, to rise to the challenge of being a Slave to Evil. Ginny is a sort perverse merging of a Succubus and a Life-Coach.

 

Racheal does things she’ll never forgive herself for, but she does get her baby back. During this section, Kylie also proves herself quite strong-willed and resourceful even though made powerless by circumstance. This first section is the books main appeal, written in present tense to increase immediacy, the chapters a short and propulsive, switching POV frequently but keeping focus mostly on (in descending order) Rachael’s, then Kylie’s, and tantalizing snatches of Ginny's. It's so fast paced we think little of the improbabilities. The descriptive language limited but potent in its specifics:

 

Rachel and Pete sit on the cold deck behind the house. 

Atlantic breakers. A sickle moon. The chilly, indifferent winter constellations. 

Pete is waiting for her decision. 

She finishes her Scotch and hugs herself.

‘We have to do it,’ she says.

 

This first act is the novels gives us a Heroine virtuous even when doing wrong and made her appealing early on because of her love of terrible jokes which don’t cease even as she is trapped and terrified, so the increasingly desperate bad jokes become increasing poignant. And she’s got a sort of second wit, sharper than her awkwardly practiced jokes, like when describing her idiot ex’s new girlfriend, “Tammy is tall and pretty with boring blue eyes.”

 

The second act describes our Villains, reaching back into their childhoods to find the roots of their moral perversions and continuing through into their adult lives. Without ever making them sympathetic, the novel does make them more human and carefully explores how they developed the skills to create their Evil Empire. The plot’s improbabilities are addressed there, and the author deserves high praise for making the scenario seem believable.

 

In the final act, one of our Villains gets over-confident and Rachael starts to act against them for first time. Notably, this novel does not rely on coincidence even when the characters perceive events as such. With the quickly jumping POVs, an increasing mundane devise in pulp/popular fiction, is deftly used to demonstrate the cause-and-effect of how choices made by one character, unseen by another, intersect. Before it’s over, things Rachael is playing the Villains’ game, does things unseen by the Villains that allow her to finally turn the tables. Rachael is now protecting her child without violating common morality, but still violating the law, with the white-hot fury of a Vigilante.

 

Our Author is Adrian McKinty, born in Northern Ireland (where is older, Award-winning series concerning Detective Sean Duffy series are set (I haven’t read them)), he was educated in England, taught in Colorado here the USA, then moved to Mexico (where he wrote this book), and currently resides in Australia. In this novel he describes the landscape of the Massachusetts’ suburbs, both the affluent and economically strained, with the deft hand of a native.

 

McKinty was inspired by the newspaper reports of Mexico’s own kidnapping plague, as a crime-for-profit it is far more common there than in the USA, and also the practice of swapping an adult family member for the kidnapped child to buy time to gather the ramson. McKinty went beyond that, linking highly the professional Kidnapping Gangs with the chain letters his own family received during Ireland’s “Troubles,” full of obscure or specific threats from unseen forces if you didn’t pass it on; McKinty said, “[W]e used to get these bloody horrible chain letters; we all believed it.”

 

McKinty’s own economic pressure drove this work; he’d relocated from the USA to Mexico City for financial reasons after he, his wife, and children, were evicted from their apartment/home of eight years. He described, “all their little stuff was just sitting there on the pavement and I was thinking to myself ‘Oh God Adrian, what have you done with your life?’ I’d been a teacher, with a good income. I thought ‘You’ve been off on this bloody ego trip, you’re going to get yourself a job, quit this writing, go back to teaching and call it a day for a couple of years’ … On the surface I was winning all these awards, getting great reviews and getting praised. On the other hand it was completely fake. I wasn’t providing any income for the family. They were selling two or three thousand copies a year. You can’t really live on that. So, my poor wife was working full-time and I was living this life of the artist.”

 

He was suffering the fate of all too many mid-list Authors whose work gets published, often with professional recognition, but publishers don’t market their work the way they used to. Mid-listers have endured drops in income over the last two decades that hover just below the 50% mark.

 

The families move to Mexico City was because his wife was offered a job, and McKinty quit writing in disgust, becoming a became a bartender and Uber driver. McKinty hated being an Uber driver and even has one of the Villains quip that their Fiendish Plot was “the goddamn Uber of kidnapping.”

 

The above-quoted cover-blub was provided by A-list Thriller Author Don Winslow who is also McKinty’s friend. Winslow was upset about McKinty throwing in the towel, “It was really upsetting to me to see how he was being treated. Someone with Adrian’s talent should be able – at the very least – to make a living wage at what they want to do. He was broke, evicted from his home, and really struggling. He wanted to quit. I knew the feeling. A number of years ago I was in a similar place.”

 

Winslow called his Agent, Shane Salerno (also a Screenwriter and Film Producer), who in turn called McKinty. “Don told me you’ve given up writing.”

 

Salerno got McKinty to talk about this, yet unrealized, book. Salerno liked the sound of it and wanted to see a draft.

 

McKinty, “Maybe in a couple of years, when I’ve got my finances sorted out.”

 

Salerno, “What if I wired you $10,000 into your bank account tonight?”

 

McKinty said he’d think about it.

Salerno said no, go and write it now. “Forget bartending. Forget driving bloody Uber. You’re writing this book.”

 

McKinty took up the challenge. “It’s like that Al Pacino film – I thought I was out and these guys got me to do one last job.”

 

What Salerno pulled of next, after some “some major league craziness,” was worthy of a pulp-novel Hero. He secured a six-figure book deal and then a seven-figure movie deal (still unrealized). Amusing, in the book, Character Pete worries about who will be cast to play him in the movie version.

 

Author McKinty had studied philosophy at Oxford and his Character Rachael teaches the same at a community college so in the book, famous Philosophers are referenced in a non-encumbering way. McKinty was interested in the morality of breaking moral rules. “I wanted to take a person who breaks all these codes of morals. In every conceivable code of moral philosophy, she does the wrong thing. It’s the wrong thing to do and yet our instinct as a reader is, I’d do it too. We’d all do this even though it’s horrible.

 

“In terms of Kantian ethics it’s the wrong thing; in terms of utilitarian ethics it’s the wrong thing; in terms of Aristotelian ethics it’s the wrong thing. It’s the wrong thing to do and yet our instinct as a reader is, I’d do it too. We’d all do this even though it’s horrible.”

 

The novel is not without flaws: Rachael, ironically, proves too appealing, though the chills we readers will ask ourselves how much of our decency would sacrifice to save our child, mostly our moralities remain in a safe place. Her wry observations speak of someone too balanced in an off-kilter situation (“First comes the cancer, then the divorce, then your daughter gets kidnapped, then you become the monster.”) We feel for her plight, but unfortunately, she never disappoints us, blunting the book’s wish to explore really tough questions. When she goes beyond the limits, it’s not as disturbing as Real-World revelations of the Milgram Experiments.

 

Also, the final confrontation between Heroes and Villains, a shootout, is cartoonish and the ending too happy. The book opens with a Arthur Schopenhauer quote, “There is some wisdom to be had in taking the gloomy view and looking upon the world as a kind of hell,” but by the end, the book betrays those words.

 

On the other hand, “too appealing,” “too balanced,” and “too happy” are generally better than unappealing, histrionic, and nihilistic. And there’s no denying the book was one hell of a ride.