The Reckoning

 

The Reckoning – by John Grisham

I haven’t really been enjoying many of the latest offerings by John Grisham. This one was better than most, however. There were still some things about this book that I thought could have been improved. First, I’m fairly confident that this just might be his longest book.  It only registers a bit over 400 pages in hardback form, but the font on the pages is pretty small which allows a lot more lines per page.  The problem is that it feels like Grisham TRIED to make this his longest book. It was too long. It had too many different stories within stories, and I had to skim much of this book to alleviate boredom at times.

The story takes place in Mississippi (where else?) in 1946. Pete Banning is a World War II vet. He was in his 30s during the war, so he already has college aged kids at the conclusion of the war. He’s also a surviving POW and his family presumed he was dead for most of the conflict.  Well, without any explanation or any apparent motive, Pete commits a murder shortly after he returns home.  He doesn’t hide his guilt, knows his life is now forever altered for the worse, yet seems completely indifferent.

No one in the small town knows why Pete did such a thing, and he gives nobody any clues. He spends his days in the local jail awaiting trial stone faced and unrepentant. So the first part of this novel is one of Grisham’s “trial” stories. We’ve read this detail before in Grisham books. The lawyers arguing, the plea bargaining, the long political selection of the jury, etc.  At first I was a bit scared that the whole book was going to be nothing but the trial.  That was a daunting thought since, as I stated, this is a rather large book.

Well, for better or worse, there’s more. We then go back in time when Pete met his wife to be, their courtship, and his enlistment. He’s assigned in the Philippines right before the U.S. is invaded at Pearl Harbor. If you know anything about the second world war, you know that the Philippines is the absolute worst place to be in 1942 for an American soldier. Banning finds himself in the hands of the Japanese as a prisoner and the treatment is brutal. Grisham does a good job (as always) with detail, but reading about the Bataan Death March is awfully harsh.  This escapade is itself, its own novel. I have to honestly state that if you’re unfamiliar with this atrocity, this is a good place to learn a bit about such an unpleasant time in U.S. history. (Grisham also lists several books in the Afterward that he recommends that detail this horrible event.)

But there’s still more. More legal squabbling from the survivors of the victims once we jump back to the current time, and a ton of unnecessary storytelling of Banning’s two college kids and their studies at their respective universities. The majority of this could have, and should have, been cut out.  There’s so much here, that we find ourselves frustrated when it seems we never arrive to the answer to the question we’ve been asking since the first chapter: Why did Pete do it? 

When we finally learn the truth, the conclusion is somewhat satisfying, yet not particularly overwhelming. One wishes we didn’t have to wade through so much ennui to finally get to the “big reveal”.  Still, though, this was a good story overall, yet can be a bit hard to stomach in some places.   Definitely one of Grisham’s best over the last decade or so, but one can’t help but miss Grisham’s glory days of yore