The Firm (1991)

“[you’ll acquire] A certain amount of cynicism. This business works on you. When you were in law school you had some noble idea what a lawyer should be. A champion of individual rights; a defender of the Constitution; a guardian of the oppressed; an advocate for your client’s principles. Then after you practice for six months you realize you were nothing but hired guns. Mouthpieces for sale to the highest bidder, available to anybody, any crook, any sleazebag with enough money to pay your outrageous fees. Nothing shocks you. It’s supposed to be an honorable profession, but you’ll meet so many crooked lawyers you’ll want to quit and find an honest job. Yeah Mitch, you’ll get cynical. And it’s sad, really.”
― John Grisham, The Firm

The book is so much better then the film version. The Firm is one of those books I reread every few years or so and it still feels fresh. Undeniably one of Grisham's best, if not his best.

I am not going into the plot because 90 percent of readers already know it but a few thoughts:

I adored Abby. Not so Mitch Mcdeer. OK..in case someone has not read it, I should put a spoiler warning in here.

SPOILERS:

I thought Mitch was one of those smug "to cool" jocks and never really took to him although I did root for him. But he so easily cheated on Abby (even before they were married) and I just could not imagine being friend's with his character but that's me.

Bit there is not one dull moment in The Firm. It is really one of the most fun suspenseful legal thrillers you could ever hope to read and that is why I often reread it. ( )

8432072435

Great read!

I can't believe I haven't read this before now!
I really enjoyed how the tension and unanswered questions start building almost immediately. I stayed up way too late last night finishing this because I needed to see how everything turned out. Very hard to put down! ( )

John Grisham

The Firm

Island Books, Paperback [1992].
16mo. 501 pp.

First published, February 1991.
This edition, February 1992.
52nd printing per number line, undated.

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This time I reversed the order: read the book first, watched the movie afterwards. It was the other way round the previous three times and I was curious how Grisham would fare if he is given the lead. He did very well.

This is Grisham’s second novel. It is very different than the first, A Time to Kill (1989), which is a classic legal thriller. The Firm contains no trials, no court rooms and very little law stuff, mostly in the unexciting area of taxation. It is certainly a thriller, though, crowned with a hectic chase in the last hundred pages or so, very much like The Pelican Brief (1992) and The Client (1993) but more engrossing than either of them. The story is far simpler, sort of like The Devil’s Advocate (I mean the movie, don’t know about the book) but without the hellish twist in the second half. Suspension of disbelief is required for most of the time, of course, but only in pleasantly small doses. As a feat of pure storytelling, this novel is an outstanding achievement, the very definition of overused words like “page-turner” and “unputdownable”. It’s not simply better, far better indeed, than Sydney Pollack’s movie. It’s better than any movie could possibly be.

There is very little else. Mitch McDeere, a Harvard hotshot as cocky as they come, “young, dumb and full of cum” as they say, is our protagonist as well as the only character that acquires some sort of substance in the course of these 500 pages. He is caught in quite a predicament, full of life-changing or life-threatening (as the case may be) decisions, between the hammer and the anvil: the Firm and the FBI. Both deserve their capitals with a vengeance. They are the other main characters here: non-human, but not in the least inhuman. The Firm has a sinister aura, an illusion of unlimited power, about it that is totally lost in the movie, as was the FBI’s commendable desire to help Mitch at almost any cost. The humans are less interesting. Abby, the good wife, and Avery, the charming rake, are promising shadows. But Grisham had no time to develop them at all. He left them as plot conventions rather than human beings. I think he made the right decision. Had it been more character-driven, like The Client, this would probably have been a lesser book.

On a lower level, the book’s a fascinating glimpse back to those times, 30 years ago, when copying machines were state-of-art technology and paper was wasted in astronomical amounts on bureaucratic claptrap. This last, alas, hasn’t changed as much as the staggering evolution of computers ever since might suggest. This is as sad as the fact that many scenes from this book simply could not happen today. Smart phones and internet have killed, in addition to many young brains, modern fiction as well. Grisham was fortunate to write at least his early novels before that. The Copying Ruse on the Caymans should be hilarious from a modern point of view; perhaps younger readers than the present scribbler would find it so. I did find it amusing, but more so tense and even chilling. It’s one of those scenes, like the final chase on the Emerald Coast, that are bound to stay with me for good.

So is the ending. It is something like a modern version of a swashbuckling adventure. I have found it deeply satisfying, perhaps more deeply than I’d care to admit even to myself. It manages to convey a sense of ultimate freedom. One simply has to admit that Mitch is right: “There are worse things than sailing around the Caribbean with eight million bucks in the bank.” ( )

Once we finally got into the thick of the plot, things moved quickly and I wanted to find out what was going to happen next. There were times that I found myself thinking that we needed to get back to the story a spend a little less time on specific details/laws (as I find with most courtroom dramas). Overall, this was a great 2nd John Grisham book and I will read more in the future. ( )