THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 19, 1994 TAG: 9406150515
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
DATELINE: 940619 LENGTH: Medium
JOHN GRISHAM
{REST} Doubleday. 486 pp. $23.50.
\ \ NOT LONG AGO Mississippian John Grisham, that best-selling wizard of the legal potboiler, intimated that he may forsake his fiction career for a more satisfying and, perhaps, nobler calling. If lawyer-turned-writer Grisham does end his fabulously lucrative publishing run, his latest, and most substantive novel, The Chamber, would make a suitable swan song.
After writing a succession of three - The Firm, The Pelican Brief and The Client - lackluster, preposterous, mindless, manipulative, predictable and contrived ``thrillers'' that, although mildly entertaining in a silly, escapist sort of way, never thrilled, Grisham has redeemed himself. No, he is not yet a ``true'' writer; even Grisham knows that. But he is a man of intelligence and conscience, and he imbues The Chamber with enough of both to make it quite respectable, even honorable.
Twenty-three years after bombing a Jewish lawyer's office, killing the lawyer's twin 5-year-old sons and maiming him, former Ku Klux Klansman Sam Cayhall now 69, sits on Mississippi's Death Row, a month from his Aug. 8 execution.
Within the first 22 pages of The Chamber - true to Grisham's fast-start form - Sam, a mean, bigoted, remorseless cuss, is arrested for the 1967 crimes, tried twice before two white good-ole-boy ``hung'' juries, freed for 14 years, retried by a zealous young prosecutor, who later becomes governor, convicted of murder and sentenced to die.
Within the next 15 pages, Adam Hall, Cayhall's brilliant, 26-year-old grandson who now works as a rookie associate at the Chicago law firm that Cayhall fired after 9 1/2 years of fruitless appeals and post-conviction challenges, commandeers his grandfather's case and begins his own desperate legal filings.
Over the remaining 400-plus pages, grandfather and grandson - ``blood of my blood'' - count down together to execution and/or salvation. Adam will seek confrontation with his tortured family history - KKK lynchings, suicides, alcoholism - and Sam will seek forgiveness or risk damnation.
Like Grisham's unheralded first novel, A Time To Kill, the message - here, one of moral ambiguity and human connectedness - not the messengers, dominates The Chamber.
Grisham begins by rigging Cayhall's case: Although the ``Klucker'' (slang for KKK) had killed cold-bloodedly before, he did not intend to kill the lawyer or his family. Unaware that his accomplice, who was never apprehended or implicated, had wired a timing device, Cayhall assumed the bomb would detonate shortly after they planted it at 4 a.m., not at 8 a.m., when his sadistic cohort triggered it. And yet, Cayhall, after years of solitary self-study, comes to understand that he could have prevented the children's deaths and their father's later suicide. He is guilty.
I have often chastised Grisham for passing off bad, as in fictional, law as actual law and moronic legal reasoning as sound. In his three blockbusters, he chose, irresponsibly and lazily, to lampoon lawyers as shysters and sleazeballs rather than to explain, in context, what they actually do. Finally, Grisham atones for these sins. At long last, he does his homework!
The Chamber is a first-rate primer on death-row life and death-penalty law that develops the human element - the views of the victims and the public, as well as the condemned - while detailing the day-to-day maneuverings of so-called ``gangplank appeals.'' Grisham takes a few minor liberties, but basically he delivers the goods on the law, the courts, the process and the politics, adeptly handling Adam's various challenges to Sam's execution, such as a constitutional objection to the gas chamber as ``cruel and unusual'' punishment.
He also convincingly describes Sam's drab, unchanging, boxlike existence. The death-row inmate sleeps 16 hours a day in a 6-by-9-foot oven-hot cell, chain-smoking in the vain hope that lung cancer will kill him before the gas does. He deserves to be where he is, but his despair is still poignant. Why not just let him die naturally in prison?
Although he strives to present all sides to the debate on capital punishment, Grisham clearly shares Adam's view that it is murder and, therefore, morally wrong. Those who do not think similarly may find the cold, sanctimonious Adam a less than agreeable protagonist. In truth, The Chamber may only appeal to people open to argument on the death penalty.
The Chamber educates and challenges. I applaud this serious effort by Grisham. The wait is worth the wait. by CNB