The Client (book review)

The Client by John Grisham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Eleven-year-old Mark Sway and his younger brother Ricky go for an illicit smoke in the woods when they come across a man trying to commit suicide. Before he succeeds he reveals to them that he was the lawyer of a man who murdered a US senator, and knows where the body was hidden - the vital evidence needed to convict the killer. Mark soon finds himself being hunted, both by the killers who want to silence him, and the prosecutors and police who want him to talk.

John Grisham is a well-known author of crime fiction, and, having been a lawyer, usually with a legal twist and quite a lot of courtroom drama. I've read several of them, but this is the only one I've read three times. I first bought it at an airport bookshop to read on a plane -- a 17-hour flight to Russia. A few years later I saw the film on TV, and re-read it then, about 20 years ago.

This time my interest was more technical -- I'm writing a book, and wanted to see how Grisham handed the dialogue of kid versus cops. But after 20 years I'd forgotten many details, so I enjoyed reading it again, and I think it is one of Grisham's better books. From the point of view of technique, it was not a great deal of help, but interesting none the less. The book I am writing is set in the past, before South Africa had television, and so I was struck by how much of Mark Sway's interaction with cops was shaped by what he had seen on TV. In many places in the story he saw himself almost as an actor in a TV drama.

When he realises the difficulty of his position, Mark thinks he needs to hire a lawyer, which is what the characters in TV dramas do. He first tries to see an ambulance-chasing lawyer whose advertising he has seen on TV, but is turned down because he doesn't have a potentially lucrative actionable injury. He randomly knocks on the door of another lawyer who has an office in the same building, who happens to do a lot of work for children, and so begins the relationship between lawyer and client that is central to the story. Mark had to learn that the law and lawyers are not always what they seem to be on TV, and the lawyer, Reggie Love, has to learn how to handle legal battles that are not usually the ones that children are faced with.

It made me think about media and children's perceptions of the law. I can remember two films I saw when I was Mark's age, one in a cinema and one in the social hall at Mount Edgecombe, then a little village isolated in the cane fields somewhere north of Durban. One was called Knock on any Door, and was dark and quite violent. The other was The Lavender Hill Mob, which was light and humorous, and had the most memorable car chase of any movie I have ever seen. Neither seemed much of a basis for shaping one's perceptions of police, lawyers and criminal law.

Mark Sway, on the other hand, seemed to see shows like LA Law frequently. But in a sense, he was the last of a generation; 1993, when The Client was published, when the Internet and mobile phones were moving from being the prerogatives of a few to becoming available to the masses, which would change to role and focus of broadcast TV. So perhaps the post-TV generation would relate to the law, the police and crime differently.

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