Bill wrote:
"[Parker] shouldn't take business calls at home."
I had the same thought. Okay, Parker no longer has the cut
out he had at the beginning of the series, so no one
communicated with him directly, but he should have put
something in place other than his home phone, even if it is
in Claire's name. For all of the time he spent calculating
how much info every stranger had on him, how directly he
could be tied to the job at hand, it was ridiculously easy
for him to be tracked home earlier in the book. Granted these
are mostly older criminals, but I'm amazed none uses the
internet in any way, if just going to internet cafes so it
won't be on their own phone line. I also found it odd no one
used pre-paid cell phones.
"It's a great ending. For a bank robber, Parker seems to have
a Buddhist sense of non-attachment and calm. If he needs to
leave a building, he'll go out the front door. . . . And
stealing and killing when he must."
See, that's the crux of the problem here. I never got the
feeling here that he "must." There have been times in the
series where Parker really needed a job. He had run through
his reserves and had to take a slightly iffy job to replenish
them, a job he would not take if he weren't a bit desperate.
I did not get a hint here that he was desperate. It even
pointed out that he had a number of reserves to draw on. So
why would he continue on this job as the complication grew? I
might have believed it if he had been forced to leave the
house (as he should have) and leave his nearby reserves
behind.
Or the issue of age and complacency could have been dealt
with. That could take the Parker series into an interesting
new direction, deal with the question of whether or not his
Buddhistic detachment still applies to his non-job life. I
don't think it does. He has attachments, mostly through
Claire, but if he is attached to Claire, then those
attachments become his own. In recent books, they have led to
little fires, which Parker has been able to put out, but he
has steadfastly ignored that those little fires are the
smoldering coals of a much bigger fire. That could be an
interesting turning point in the series, where Parker's
attachments bring him to a crisis point.
I know I'm asking for character development in someone who is
essentially a non-character, someone who is defined almost
completely by what he does and very little by who he is
outside of his function. However, that character has been
creeping in and led to some contradictions that need to be
dealt with, if just by building a better firewall between the
two lives. Or Stark could deal with Parker's non-monetary
need to do crime. Through the brief character Briggs, he
brought up that the heisters live at a heightened existence
while pulling jobs, although they probably don't recognize it
themselves. Why not have Parker recognize it, see if it
changes anything?
Mark
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