Essential McLuhan 348 exposed to the very evils he is dedicated to remove: “there, but for the grace of God…” Certainly, the philosopher would argue that the thriller also shows a collapse in the belief in an abstract and incorruptible justice. What Hall and Whannel are saying is that the new hero is constituted differently by virtue of being representative of the entire reading public. The Mike Hammer and James Bond stories are, of course, fantasies—but fantasies which communicate a graphic and heightened realism. Characters may be overdrawn, situations stereo-typed, resolutions predictable. But the fictional life of these stories is convincing at the very level at which the modern reader, especially the young reader, is likely to find himself most under pressure: at the level of the sensations. In a quite precise sense, the thriller novel is a novel of the sensations. Its power lies in its experiential quality, in the absence of relieving factors and the starkness of the action, and in the image of human behaviour which it offers. In exactly the same way the modern painting does not allow for the single point of view or the dispassionate survey. The modern painter offers an opportunity for dialogue within the parameters inherent in an art form which is moving away from the rational-visual and into the total world of man’s sensory involvement.