By Annabel Hill
Gray Mountain is John Grisham’s latest book and was released 23rd October 2014. It has, as far as I can ascertain, been released as a stand alone novel. It is also considered an ‘issue’ book, meaning it will deal with a problem that the author thinks should be brought to the attention of the general public.
The story starts with Samantha, the leading protagonist, being effectively fired from her job due to her company’s loss of business as a result of the 2008 recession. However, instead of being out right fired, she is told that she can have a year’s health insurance and there’s the vague promise that she could get her job back if the economy stabilises by the end of the year. This though is conditional upon her taking a job as an unpaid intern at a legal aid clinic. She is sent a list from Human Resources of clinics that have been selected as possible places for her to go, with a note saying to apply now as the places may get filled up. For some unknown reason, all these legal aid clinics are states away from New York; this is either to try and imply New York has no legal aid clinics or that they accept that an unpaid legal intern has no hope of being able to afford a place to live or anything else in New York. Either way, the main point is that Samantha has to travel far away from the sophisticated and cosmopolitan city of New York to a remote ‘backwards’ town/village. Eventually, she chooses the Mountain Legal Aid Clinic located in Brady, Virginia. The book then focuses on her slowly adapting to life in rural Virginia, and sometimes prodding the big bad coal companies with a stick.
One of the few good parts of this book is the way the settings are depicted. The atmosphere of the recession is well created and helps you to empathise with Samantha and her colleagues. The vivid beauty of the Appalachian Mountains and their horrific destruction is also very emotively described.
However, there are a number of flaws with this novel. Firstly, it seems to be trying to win some sort of record for number of John Grisham tropes that can be shoehorned into one novel. A few that I managed to pick out, off the top of my head are: ridiculously attractive female; phone tapping, goons trailing and threatening the protagonists; bad company doing bad/unethical things; damaging internal memos that are clear evidence of illegal activity and end up in the protagonists’ hands; lawyer in a large Wall-Street-esque firm trading it in to go help real people in a small less profitable firm, etc. This cramming in of tropes that were already overused before this book makes it repetitive and dull for people who’ve read his other books, but they also make it too unfocused and messy. It doesn’t help that all of the above tropes (with the exception of the attractive females, because that’s always been unnecessary, not to mention completely unrealistic) have been done far better in his other books, mostly because Grisham just focused on one of them. For instance, “The Rainmaker“, which I believe to be possibly his best book, focuses solely on an unethical company and uses their internal memos against them and does it extremely well. Granted, it also has an attractive female character in it, but frankly that has become so ubiquitous in his books it may as well be considered a secondary signature.
Also, there are too many different plot treads that are intermittently dropped and picked up through-out the novel, which creates a very disjoined and uneven pace. The lack of a cohesive and structured order to the book makes it very tiresome to read and hard to remain invested in. Of course, as this is classed as an ‘issue’ novel, the multiple plot lines may be a result of the author trying to show as many problems with the mining companies as possible. While that may be commendable goal, Grisham has clearly overreached himself and, had he restricted himself to fewer plot lines, the book would have been a lot less cluttered and on the whole a better novel.
A clear example of this is the competition between two and a debatable third plot line for the title of ‘main case’. The first is Krull Mining, a company which has been dumping carcinogenic pollutants into the local area. The other case is Casper-Slate which is proven to have hidden medical reports. The debatable third case is that of the Lisa Tate, whose children were killed. None of these cases ever achieve enough sustained prominence to be considered the main case in the novel. The thing is that each of these cases have the potential to be very strong plots; and really deserve a book each, and would, generally speaking, make a good trilogy. However instead they are all crammed into one book, which despite being over 360 pages long, really isn’t long enough to give each case the attention and time it deserves. This leads very nicely on to the biggest problem with this book.
Gray Mountain has no ending; the book just stops. Now, as mentioned before, there has been no report of a sequel to this book, so by rights it should be judged as a stand alone novel, and indeed you read it believing it is one. Yet, nothing is resolved by the end other than a few minor plot points that were dealt with in the start and middle. Oh and Samantha decides whether she’ll stay in Virginia or return to New York, a question which by the way, if you have read any other Grisham novels or know what his thoughts are on lawyers, you already know the answer to. The Krull mining case fades out in the penultimate chapter, at the stage it really should be at in the middle of the book. Casper-Slate is not mentioned at all and really hasn’t been since its abrupt abandonment part way through the novel, and the Tate case is left with the distant promise of later appeal work. It is abundantly clear that a sequel should have been announced for this book, or at the very least an epilogue written and added to the back pages.
To conclude then, “Gray Mountain” is a book that people who haven’t read many Grisham books will probably enjoy, at least more than people who have read most of them. That said, if you haven’t read the majority of his novels, you’d be far better off reading some of his other books which, from the ones I’ve read, are universally better than this one. If you have read most of his lawyer ones then, odds are, you’ll find it predictable, boring and ultimately a waste of your time.
The Stump 