It is said that making the first million is tough. Once that is done. The millions take care of themselves. Till recently I thought the same was true with books. You write one novel and the other novels come out effortlessly. Grisham obviously still believes this.
Otherwise he would not have let The King Of Torts happen.
I had delayed writing the review for two reasons.
One is after labouring through for two forty pages of the book I gave up. Agreed It is not meant to win a Booker, Pulitzer or whatever. But as a person who has spent good money on a book I expect a coherent plot , a plausible story, clear characterisation. I think I am not asking for too much. Grisham feels I am asking for the moon. But still I had not finished the book and it was unfair of me to comment on it.
Second reading it was bad enough having to explain it to you reader would be worse.
But a sense of duty has made me
a) Grit my teeth and read the book to its end
b) Write this review to warn hitherto unsuspecting public not to walk into the mire of Grisham.
To make an unpleasant task slightly let us do an exercise together- Just like the management gurus who conduct seminars for which you enrol paying obscene amounts of money and then end up playing silly games like building sugar cubes sky scrapers or running three legged races with another unsuspecting partner. But I am digressing.
Type out the word shoddy . Place your cursor on the word and right click. Get the stnonyms. What do you get? I got careless, slapdash, sloppy, inferior, substandard, poor, trashy. Voila! Kudos to modern technology. You have it in a nutshell. The King of Torts is all that and more!
There might be Grisham fans out there who are right at this moment on their feet , saying how come he trash a novel- has he even read it? So only to set at rest the doubting Thomases here is the outline about the novel.
The novel is about an OPD ( not out patient department but Office of the Public defender) lawyer Clay who while defending an American of African descent stumbles- not even stumbles –is deliberately chosen by a firefighter Pace( no not a “fire” fire fighter but a do all) of a multinational pharma company to initiate tort action against another drug company. One thing leads to another to yet another action and bingo he is the King of torts. Swank jets, Carribean cruises et al At the start of the novel he breaks off with his girl friend of four years Rebecca- because her parents do not approve of a lawyer with no future. He disapproves of the bull dozing nature of Rebecca’s father who literally bulldozes for a living. Clay has now a Georgian model - Ridley as a companion. But is she a bi?
Then of course is pay back time for all that he has done. So he goes bankrupt, is crippled and loses his licence-( lawyer’s ) Oh he also gets his girl no not Ridley but Rebecca. But do I care. No.
Reading the previous paragraph once again , I feel M..mm not bad. No I am not having second thoughts about the novel. But I feel I have done a reasonable job of laying out the shreds of the plot.
If the plot is far fetched, the characterisations are all one -dimensional. Even Baywatch bimbos have better depth!
Who says TV has spoiled the reading habit. It is books like these that make readers go for the remote. If you want to know about lawyers watch “The Practice” instead!
I do not in general quote others but I thought I would end my review with this. It is very apt!
’’This is not a book that should be tossed lightly aside. It should be hurled with great force.’’ - Dorothy Parker