The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Tuesday, March 13, 2007
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I planned on reading just a chapter of Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock last night before bed, but I could never seem to find an appropriate stopping point. At half past three, I finally reached the end -- but it was a long time before I finally got to sleep. Fearing kept me up. He's that good. If you aren't familiar with the book, perhaps you've seen one of the movies it inspired. There's The Big Clock (1948) for starters, starring Ray Milland as the crime mag editor George Stroud, which is the most literal adaptation -- a bit too literal, if you ask me, since the metaphorical clock from Fearing's title becomes an actual clock in the film. Then there's the 1987 version starring Kevin Costner called No Way Out, where the editor becomes a naval officer and the action moves from a skyscraper to the Pentagon. In 2003, Denzel Washington starred in Out of Time, a looser adaptation that changes the hero's profession again, this time to a small-town sheriff. What they all have in common is that the hero is put in charge of a man-hunt where, unbeknownst to his superiors, he is the prey. He has to confound the investigation long enough to uncover the truth about his murdered mistress.

The book adds a layer of complexity, as books have a habit of doing. As I said, the 'big clock' in the novel isn't a literal clock. It's George Stroud's way of describing fate, the vast, impersonal mechanistic force that runs things. He's innocent of the murder he's suspected of, but guilty of betraying his wife. When he realizes the investigation he's led will inevitably snare him, he reflects on the power of the 'big clock':

I told myself it was just a tool, a vast machine, and the machine was blind. But I had not fully realized its crushing weight and power. That was insane. The machine cannot be challenged. It both creates and blots out, doing each with glacial impersonality. It measures people in the same way that it measures money, and the growth of trees, the life-span of mosquitoes and morals, the advance of time. And when the hour strikes, on the big clock, that is indeed the hour, the day, the correct time. When it says a man is right, he is right, and when it finds him wrong, he is through, with no appeal. It is as deaf as it is blind.

I described the big clock as fate, but I think we might also recognize it as justice, seen through the eyes of a man who hopes it will find others but not him. What I admire about The Big Clock is that the thriller and the philosophical novel sit side-by-side. In addition to the race against time, Stroud has the strange experience of seeing his life charted on a board by his colleagues who, in their pursuit of the mystery man, gather all the information they can find, including assessments of his character.

There is also an illuminating detour into the art world, including the significant renaming of a painting. The artist (one of the book's true eccentrics) calls it Study in Fundamentals, Stroud's mistress names it The Temptation of Judas, but Stroud dubs the canvas The Temptation of St. Judas, arguing that great betrayer must have been a saint: "A man like that, built to fall into line but finding himself always out of step, must have suffered twice the torment of the others. And eventually, the temptation was too much for him. Like many another saint, when he was tempted, he fell. But only briefly." The identification with Judas is telling, coming from an egotist like Stroud as he enjoys a weekend away from his family.

The films are straight thrillers and they're resolved suspensefully. The novel, though, builds up suspense but is resolved philosophically, through the good offices of the big clock. Fate -- or justice -- turns its attention from Stroud to the real villains, who have lost their fight against time. It's a delightful deus ex machina that makes perfect sense from a philosophical standpoint, though I can understand why the film-makers would opt to pay off the suspense plot. In the novel, Stroud sees his deliverance as an example of the fickleness of fate. But he doesn't think he's off the hook:

The big, silent, invisible clock was moving along as usual. But it had forgotten all about me. Tonight it was looking for someone else. Its arms and levers and steel springs were wound up and poised in search of some other person in the same blind, impersonal way it had been reaching for me on the night before. And it had missed me, somehow. That time. But I had no doubt it would get around to me again. Inevitably. Soon.

There's always been a place in my heart for novels dominated by a central metaphor. One of the reasons I was so keen on E.L. Doctorow's The March was the way it amplified Sherman's march through Georgia as a metaphor for modern life. Some readers hate this sort of thing -- one reviewer at IMDB.com says he prefers the film version of The Big Clock, where the clock is literal, because in the novel the metaphor is overworked. But if, like me, you appreciate this sort of thing, then it's worth giving Fearing's novel a try.