The Racketeer, John Grisham

John Grisham is one of my favorite writers in fiction. His plots always seem to be within the realm of reality, and his characters usually believable, relatable and gritty.

The first Grisham book I read was ‘The Firm’ while in junior college. At a time, when Sidney Sheldon was all the rage among college girls, I found his writing refreshingly mature. ‘The Street Lawyer’ settled it; his writing was nuanced and empathetic and he celebrated the seeming ordinariness of his protagonists.

The central character in ‘The Racketeer’, Malcolm Bannister, is an average bloke, whose life changed in the blink of an eye. He’s a small-town lawyer, merely getting by, when he gets caught in a web of someone else’s greed. He is convicted for a crime he didn’t commit and is sent away to prison for 10 years. He loses his family - his wife tired of waiting for him, walks away into another marriage, and he’s torn from his only son without the assurance that he will ever see him again.

Shattered by the vicissitudes of life, he spends his time plotting revenge and an escape. I thought Grisham could have done much more with this character, and sketched his bitterness in depth. I was disappointed to not see more profundity shine through from Malcolm Bannister’s protracted, uncertain and melancholic journey.

The stranglehold that bitterness is, it’s the rare man who refuses to let it shape his identity. But, I digress.

The protagonist does however, pummel his situation with humor, which makes following his exploits a good read.

The book is critical of the American incarceration system and its wastefulness; Grisham himself being an ardent advocate of prison reform. There are scathing references to arbitrary convictions and egregious wrongdoing on the part of law-enforcement agencies and other administrators of justice.

The pace is fast and there isn’t a single dull moment. Page after page, you find Bannister’s enemies and friends alike, playing into his hands. One of the most hilarious moments occurs in the latter half of the book, when Malcolm writes a ‘Dear FBI’ letter and castigates his self-important offenders with a ‘shame on you’. Sidesplitting.

The plot as it unravelled, kept gathering more and more steam, until you became convinced that this story could have no other ending but a conveniently happy one. There are far too many moving parts, far too many collaborators and one too many lucky breaks. Stay away if you cannot suspend disbelief and tend to feel agitated by loopholes or unexplained questions.

The Racketeer, then, is for the die-hard Grisham fan. By his own admission, this one is more of a work of fiction than his previous books. Strict accuracy was evidently not a priority.

I’m confident this isn’t Grisham resting on his accolades and the laurels bestowed on him by a loyal fan base. He might have dismissively attributed not steeping this book in research, to laziness, but boy, can he tell a good story.