William Saunderson-Meyer: Sarah Lotz outshines Mark Gimenez
William Saunderson-Meyer rates the wit and sparkle of Exhibit A (Penguin) by Sarah Lotz above the indulgent pseudo-legal stodge of The Common Lawyer (Sphere) by Mark Gimenez
This review first appeared in The Weekender
A lawyerly dog squares up to a dog of a lawyer
Witticisms, one-liners and acidic observations snap, crackle and pop through Sarah Lotz’s novel like an endless line of Tom Thumb crackers on Guy Fawkes night. They are colourful, they are sparky, and they are attention grabbing. But unfortunately, like the script of one of those generic television comedies, it eventually becomes too back-slappingly, side-splittingly much.
There is a fine line in any novel when, pushed too far, tart writing subsides into the merely annoying. Which in this case is a pity, because Lotz is genuinely witty and perceptive, with a sharp eye for the idiosyncracies around us.
Georgie Allen, Cape Town’s worst-dressed lawyer cum secondhand car dealer, is a convincing and endearing creation. So too is his sidekick Patrick, a transplanted Glaswegian advocate who has no embarrassment at proving accurate those stereotypes of the tightfisted Scotsman.
The secret star, however, is the eponymous Exhibit A of the title, a scruffy, hairy, malodorous, lion-hearted stray mongrel, with a penchant for licking his scrotum and rolling in smelly deposits. In fact, while this is a legal thriller fired by the author’s almost palpable sense of outrage at South Africa’s ugliest social phenomenon, at another level this is something of an animal story as to how an ugly little canine shite can wriggle his way into a tough-skinned lawyer’s heart.
The plot involves the alleged rape of a bohemian young woman, Nina, in the holding cells of a small Karoo town, by a police officer. The book was inspired by actual events and this probably explains why it unfolds in a generally predictable fashion. As one of the characters notes, in real life the John Grisham moments, where an unexpected revelation changes the entire course of a trial, are few and far between.
Reality is rather messier. Nina’s version of the rape is patchy and at times unconvincing even to her own legal team, a situation not helped by her unhappy past of sexual ambiguity; a previous claim of rape that was never reported to the police; and her history of alcohol and drug use. But unlike so many crime thrillers that at the denouement tie all the loose ends into a a tidy little bow, Lotz is respectful of the maturity of her readers to be able to tolerate contradictions, so some strands are never completely resolved.
Lotz writes with a sure hand. The tone is angry but controlled, never preachy or naïve. And damn, in spite of overdoing it on occasion, she can be wickedly funny, for instance when commenting about the ubiquity of certain publications:
”As we follow Gareth … I pause to check the books on the coffee table. The well-thumbed novel on the top of the pile is The Da Vinci Code. Knew he was a wanker.” And later: ”The receptionist presses a button on an intercom … without taking her eyes off us for a second, as if she’s scared we’ll abscond with the out-of-date issues of Men’s Health scattered all over the coffee table. Does everybody read it? Maybe it’s the law.”
A surfeit of humour is not a problem that Mark Gimenez has to deal with. The Common Lawyer is too ponderous to allow much levity, aside from juvenile banter pitched at the banal level of an Archie and Veronica comic.
Young Andy Prescott is plucked from vocational obscurity as a traffic court lawyer in Austin, Texas, to become the legal point man of a billionaire property developer. The dream job turns into a nightmare, as Andy’s life is put in danger by his boss’ mission to track down a medical treatment that could save the life of his young son, who is dying of leukemia.
Interestingly, Andy, like the hero in Exhibit A, also has a dog, this one called Max. Remarkably, despite it supposedly being the centre of Andy’s life, in all of 356 pages the reader never finds out the breed of the animal.
This is prettty much par for the course in The Common Lawyer. What we are indifferent to, we are inundated with – like screeds of unabashed praise to the city of Austin. Its countryside is more scenic, its women more beautiful, its men more daring, its music scene more vibrant, than anywhere else.
Gimenez’s first book, the Colour of Law, was a good, serviceable legal thriller which at the time inspired some hyperbole from The Times, punting the idea that Gimenez was “the next John Grisham”. The one useful thing that this most recent indulgent, pseudo-legal stodge from Gimenez achieves, is to prove emphatically that he isn’t.
Let’s put it another way. If canine anti-hero Exhibit A met The Common Lawyer coming down the street, he would probably take a dump on the Austin boy’s shoes.
Ends
