An engaging read

His books may have sold 250 million copies worldwide, but John Grisham’s attempts to reach a larger audience led to his first non-fiction book, The Innocent Man (2006), his first baseball novel, Calico Joe (2012), and his Theodore Boone Series for young readers (from 2010).

The series, which stars 13-year-old Theodore Boone, the so-called ‘Kid Lawyer,’ was written, Grisham claims (a little tongue-in-cheek), as a means to compete with Harry Potter. Theodore is described as a precocious, well-read teen, a respected debater, a boy scout, a Perry Mason fan and the scion of two veteran lawyers. He may not be the current all-American ideal of boyhood (although he certainly would have been in Grisham’s childhood), but Theodore’s life is marked by unshakable ethics.

In The Activist, which is the fourth book of the series, Theodore discovers that large tracts of forest and agricultural land, including the farm of his friend, Hardie Quinn, are due to be bulldozed, to make way for a multi-million dollar highway bypass. Other homes, schools and business lie in the way of the road. The government wields what it calls the right of ‘eminent domain,’ secure in the knowledge that it can appropriate anyone’s property for public use. Yet, when Theodore discovers that the bypass is motivated by greed, he finds himself on a mission to stop the project without breaking the law himself.

There is no wizardry or goo-goo-eyed monologues on romance in this book. Instead, The Activist is quintessentially a Grisham legal thriller, pared down for teens. It is also a book which explains to young readers what an activist is, what floating bonds are used for, or how an American city council meeting is run. The world within its covers is vivid and completely believable. It is also a story in which the presence of adults is mitigated — the staple of young adult literature.

If one must marvel at the 55-year-old Grisham’s talent for capturing the world of children, we must also recall that Grisham has always had a penchant for describing the lives of young people caught in strife. In 1993’s The Client, the narrative weaved around 11-year-old Mark Sway, who is witness to an important confession by a mob lawyer. Before that, in 1989-90’s A Time to Kill, which Grisham pedalled out of his car trunk following its rejection by 22 publishers, he chronicled the traumatic life of a 12-year-old rape victim, and her father’s subsequent murder of the man responsible.

Arguably, Grisham’s best stories are from 90s — that warm fuzzy period when the United States was riding on an economic high, free from the threat of terrorists, the entanglements of dubious wars and political divisiveness. It was the decade when the possibilities seemed endless, when the mafia or organised crime were the worst threats to civil society and where dishonesty amounted to the localised greed of men.

In The Activist, however, Grisham’s chosen villains are, mirroring the great suspicions of today, corrupt politicians and greedy land developers, involved in selling America to corporate interests, one parcel of land at a time. And there is nothing more indicative of the American ethos of freedom than the country’s ties to its great expanse of land — a privilege sometimes sneered at by outsiders. In Tom Wolfe’s novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, a leading character, an Englishman, brings voice to this sneer by jealously deriding providence for granting Americans what he calls, ‘a great swollen fat fowl of a continent.’

In The Activist, the land may not be virginal, but it is loved and cherished. The plot winds slowly, as Theodore and his young friends set about organising a campaign aimed at saving nature, quashing the bypass and the unscrupulous men behind it. Sadly, the stakes are not that high and the villains, not that omniscient. It certainly isn’t Harry Potter, but young readers many find the story interesting even if it sometimes reads as though it were written in the era of the Hardy Boys, but without all that impetuous and gripping teenage angst.

Theodore Boone: The Activist
John Grisham
Hodder & Stoughton
2013, pp 289
250