From page one of The Monkey’s Raincoat, Robert Crais has shown us Elvis Cole’s connection to the character of Pinocchio, best known from the eponymous 1940 Disney animated film. On the wall of Elvis’ office hangs a Pinocchio clock with eyes that swing back and forth as the clock ticks, and he’s proud of it. Through each successive novel we see many people come through the office and find Elvis’ choice of decor odd, and they’re often people who end up not understanding Elvis as a whole. He also keeps a figure of Jiminy Cricket on his desk–where he can always look at it, as though looking for inspiration, a conscience he doesn’t even need to whistle for.
At first, I only read the Pinocchio interest as a quirk, not a trait stemming from a deep place in his heart and past. As I continued to read through the series, thinking more about Elvis’ hurts and motives, I began to realize exactly why that beloved Italian puppet meant so much to him.
The story of Pinocchio is that of a wooden puppet, carved by the toymaker Geppetto. Geppetto loved Pinocchio so much that he wished (upon a star) that the puppet could become a real boy. That night, a fairy brought Pinocchio to life–though still a puppet. She promised Pinocchio that if he was “brave, truthful, and selfless” that Pinocchio could become a real boy. Pinocchio set out into the world and almost immediately went astray, finding himself the prisoner of a puppet master who never intended to set him free. Pinocchio was granted freedom by the fairy eventually, but she told him she couldn’t rescue him anymore. After further misadventures, Pinocchio then had to save Geppetto from the belly of the whale Monstro and appeared to lose his life in the process. The fairy, having decided that Pinocchio proved himself brave, truthful, and selfless, restored his life and turned him into a real boy.
If you’ve been following my Twitter for a while now, you know my thoughts on Elvis and “normal” lives and families. Feeling robbed of one in his childhood, he aspires his whole life to achieve that. This presented in the ways Elvis observed Roy Abbott’s healthy family life and wanted it so badly that he learned how to have a secure attachment style. He wanted to sit around a table with parents and siblings and share about each other’s day, and he wanted to be able to relate to people without fear. Though Elvis never got that family, he did learn secure attachment and benefited from that throughout his life.
I believe that by the time we reach The Forgotten Man, Elvis still sees himself as not quite a “real boy” in the world. He certainly moves and breathes like the people around him, and talks like them, but feels there’s something he inherently lacks. Moreso, Elvis feels like he should be able to gain that which he feels is missing by merit, by achieving a certain level of goodness asked of him. It may sound strange, as no fairy ever promised Elvis as much, but the promise didn’t come from a fairy in this story. Why does Elvis feel this was promised, if there was no fairy?
There kind of was a fairy, but she wasn’t blonde with a blue dress.
Puritan ideals shaped American culture and work ethic since the colonies, and is so deeply woven into society that you can’t tell it’s there unless you’re looking. If anyone’s ever told you to get back to work because “time is money,” you’ve experienced the Puritan spirit. On the religious side, Puritans believed that you could only go to heaven if God decided that you specifically could earn it. How? By behaving properly and following his instruction to you. This bled over into the rest of our lives: you could have the promised blessings of wealth and happiness, but only if you behaved properly. You know what else this sounds like?
You could be a real boy if you proved yourself brave, truthful, and selfless.
Elvis wouldn’t have to grow up in a religious family to have this belief drilled into him. As a young man growing up in America (though this is not exclusively American), it was everywhere. Elvis probably learned it at school, from his grandfather and aunt, from any movies or cartoons or books he consumed. Certainly from one movie he consumed and continued to fixate on.
Pinocchio was made different but was blessed with normalcy by embodying the ideals asked of him, and Elvis sees himself as an outsider in the same way. The problem is that no matter how brave, truthful, and selfless Elvis is, no blue fairy is going to come by and magic away that feeling. He can try every day. He does try every day. He keeps the reminders everywhere: the wall clock, the Jiminy Cricket figure on his desk as a reminder to be good, just as Jiminy was Pinocchio’s conscience in the film.
Although this drive carries Elvis throughout the entire series, I want to make a point of recognizing its role in The Forgotten Man, the 10th book in the Elvis Cole series. The Forgotten Man focuses on Elvis solving the murder of a seemingly homeless man who, as a dying declaration, said he came to Los Angeles to connect with his son–Elvis Cole. (It might feel reminiscent of the way that Gepetto, searching for his son, was swallowed by a whale and presumed lost.) I’ve had plenty to say about this book over the last month, and I’ve put quite a bit of it on Twitter.
We learn that he is in fact not Elvis’ father but George Reinneke, the father of a man who once murdered Detective Kelly Diaz’s family–Diaz being the woman who just happened to be the only witness present as unfortunate Reinneke bled out in a dark Los Angeles alley. It comes to light through this investigation that Diaz herself murdered Reinneke and created the “lost father” narrative so that Elvis would look deeper, inevitably finding the man who murdered her brother and parents when Diaz was only four: David Reinneke, AKA Frederick Conrad.
The Forgotten Man reaches its climax as Frederick confronts both Diaz and Cole, landing solid hits on both of them with a shotgun. With the timely intervention of Joe Pike and Carol Starkey, Frederick dies and Elvis is rescued. Diaz doesn’t make it, and Elvis’ life isn’t a sure bet, either. He spends days in a coma, and during this time, Elvis has a dream. Elvis dreams that he wakes up in a traditional all-American home to the sound of both his parents downstairs. His mother, who struggled with her connection to reality, and his father who he never knew–together again, cooking breakfast, waiting for their beloved son.
Like any dream, this one couldn’t last. The mother he knows and the father whose face he can’t see fade into nothing, leaving Elvis alone in that perfect house, on a perfect day, the American dream in every way except that he’s alone in it. As his father froze and then disappeared, what did Elvis say?
“Dad? Daddy, look at me. You have to look at me. I’m supposed to know you! Hey, that’s why we’re here. That’s why I made this place. I took it in the chest to know you!”
I took it in the chest to know you.
I cried when I read that line. This is, in my opinion, one of the clearest examples of magical thinking that shapes Elvis’ life–the belief that behavior should dictate outcome. It’s not his fault that he’s got that idea, I think we all do. In extremes, it’s the same way we might look at a man who makes $8 million an hour and think “he must have been good enough to earn this.” At a more human level, it’s the same way we think to ourselves “if I’m a good person, if I donate and work hard, then I will earn my own good outcome.”
It’s the way Elvis believes that if he’s brave, truthful, and selfless, he’ll feel like a real boy. What’s more brave than taking it in the chest to know your father? What’s more truthful than exposing a police detective as a murderer, even if you understand the pain that drove her to it? What’s more selfless than drawing the attention of a different murderer in order to give that detective a chance to survive? Like Pinocchio, Elvis goes on a quest to find his father. Like Pinocchio, Elvis is willing to give his life in a moment of sacrifice, in order to, in his words, know his father. The man he finds in his coma dream. The man whose face he never gets to see.
No blue fairy resurrects Elvis. When he does finally return to the land of the living in a hospital bed, he’s no more or less a real man than he was at the beginning of The Forgotten Man. He’s the same Elvis he’s always been, a man who has always been brave, truthful, and selfless. A man with a powerful conscience, the kind that wears a golden badge on its chest.
The Forgotten Man shows us the depth of Elvis’ desire to know his father, to have a father who loves and wants him, taking it to the most tragic conclusion: Elvis is willing to die in order to show his love for the man who helped make him. It broke my heart to read this novel (and re-watch Pinocchio) and note the comparisons. I wondered if Elvis imagined himself that way because Pinocchio had a father who went searching for him, who desperately wanted the boy as much as the boy wanted his father. That’s the trouble with associating yourself so closely with a fictional character: if you get too close to the idea that you’re the same, you’ll begin to believe things about yourself that are only true for them.
In the meantime, only time will tell if Elvis ever comes to the realization that he’s not Pinocchio–he’s Elvis Cole. And he’s better for it.
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