The Brethren by
John Grisham
hbk out February 00
Published by Random House Audio
at £12.99
The Brethren is John Grisham’s eleventh legal thriller. “His New Bestseller,” trumpets the familiar shoutline on the front cover – and for once the familiar slogan is probably prophetic, not publishing hyperbole. Grisham has earned a fortune by writing books that chaps on beaches want to read.
It is a difficult market to crack, and all credit to him for having succeeded. Like Jeffery Archer, he appeals to people who don’t read many novels. Grisham’s stock-in-trade is the legal background: his knowledge of the law informs both his plots and many of his main characters. Like Dick Francis with horse racing, he skilfully employs his specialist knowledge in a way that makes it interesting to those who know little or nothing about the subject.
His last book, The Testament, was an attempt to break away from his usual formula (legal Sir Galahad takes on corporate evil). So too is The Brethren. The novel begins very promisingly, with three disgraced judges in Trumble, a low-security Federal prison in Florida. Piper, formerly a justice of the peace from Mississippi, is inside for embezzlement. Beech lost his wife, his money and his job as a Federal Judge when on a drunken binge he ran over two hikers in Yellowstone Park. Yarber was California’s Chief Justice until he fell foul of powerful politicians and the IRS.
Now the Trumble Trio form the “Inferior Court of North Florida”. Dressed in green choir robes, they settle the disputes of their fellow convicts with the tacit support of the prison authorities. On the quiet, however, they are building an offshore nest egg. Posing as attractive young men, they advertise for older “pen pals” in gay magazines. With the help of a scumbag lawyer on the outside, they isolate the closet gays among their correspondents and investigate their financial position and social vulnerability. When the letters become sufficiently indiscreet, the Brethren turn to blackmail.
This is one main strand of the narrative, bizarre and by and large convincing. The other strand, which works less well, concerns Congressman Aaron Lake, a squeaky clean widower who specialises in the area of defence. He is of particular interest to Maynard, the wheelchair-bound Director of the CIA, a character drawn with the psychological subtlety you’d expect from Ian Fleming on a bad day. Maynard has advance warning that a communist politician with genius IQ and army support is plotting a coup d’état in Russia. Since his omniscience extends into the future, he also knows the coup will succeed and that World War III is a dead cert.
Unfortunately America is woefully unprepared. Defence spending is down. The two main presidential candidates for the election due at the end of the year are a pair of cooing doves. But Maynard has a clever plan: Lake will emerge as a presidential candidate, backed by the dirty tricks of the CIA and the fabulous wealth of the defence industry.
The two strands of the plot are twisted together in a wholly predictable knot when the CIA discovers that Lake is one of the Brethren’s correspondents. Worse still, the Brethren realise that one of their victims is the front-running presidential candidate. So now it’s the Brethren versus the CIA, with the stakes including world peace, the American Way of Life and six million dollars. The Brethren is something of a departure for Grisham, with its low-life (and often mildly comic) scenes in Trumble and the refurbished plot devices of the Cold War mega-thriller. The former work much better than the latter. As ever, Grisham handles the factual details with crisp efficiency, whether they concern presidential primaries, a Knightsbridge hotel or a point of law. This is just as well, because the characterisation is barely more than a series of verbal identikits and the plot makes The Pink Panther seem a miracle of realism. Morality doesn’t come into it, and nor does plausibility.
The book demonstrates that Grisham has achieved sacred cow status. How else can you explain the fact that his publishers have apparently failed to edit the novel, despite the enormous investment it must represent for them? The plot’s a mess and the prose clunks and clatters over repetitions and clichés like a train over a set of points.
Apart from the incidental pleasures of Trumble, The Brethren is a disappointment. Grisham is clearly trying to escape from the formulaic prison he has constructed for himself. That’s fine, even laudable. But it doesn’t excuse the book’s shortcomings. The chaps on the beach deserve better than this.
Review first published in the Independent on 8 February 2000
(
Andrew Taylor
- author of the highly acclaimed Roth & Lydmouth Series)
The Brethren by
John Grisham