How does it compare to audio works by the same author?
Excellent
Advantages:
great book
Disadvantages:
not perfect
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
A Painted House - John Grisham
It’s been a long time since I have been on ciao so excuse my rustiness, so without further ado, I shall get started.
This is, to the best of my knowledge, John Grisham’s twelfth book. I have read all the previous ones bar two (Pelican Brief and Time to Kill.) This book, however, has finally made the leap away from the usual legal thriller though. Most people know John Grisham writes books about lawyers, corruption, high spending and general legal issues and liked him for it. This made A Painted House a big risk as it is hard to tell how a writer who has been so focused on one genre can switch and go off on a tangent. I was pleasantly surprised.
The story centres on rural Arkansas and in particular, a young boy called Luke Chandler. He is the son of a farmer and although we are not told, it is safe to assume the Chandler family have been farming for many years. Luke is seven and spends his summer trudging around the fields picking cotton every day.
Being set in the late summer or 1952, the story starts with the usual introductions of the main characters around the farm. Luke, the central character and resident hero/narrator. He is an only child but still has plenty of company in the form of his parents and grandparents. The ‘family’ also expands every summer with the arrival of some hill-people and Mexicans to aid in harvesting the cotton.
The whole book concentrates on the adventures of Luke around the farm and his trips into town. Of course, there are thousands of farm kids who do this every summer so a few unexpected things develop throughout the book and some adventures are more adventurous than others.
Leaving the plot aside for a while, after reading the book, it is easy to spot some Grisham trademarks. As I said earlier, this is his first book that doesn’t involve courts, lawyers or both but to combat this, he does keep some of his other themes running. This brings a sense of assurance to the reader and leaves Grisham followers in no doubt it is a Grisham book.
Compared to other Grisham books, this is very different, it is set in 1952 but like so many other Grisham books, it is set in the Mid-South of America. This is familiar territory and I cannot complain as his local knowledge helps the book along, you feel as if most research was confirming Grisham’s prior knowledge. This is particular relevant when he talks at length about baseball and the St. Louis Cardinals whoa re worshipped by the Chandler family.
He also, once gain, writes through the eyes of a child, as he did in The Client. Again, using familiar territory to help him with the jump away from legal book. As far as I can tell, the book is meant to be in the first person but it gets a bit messy and leaves plot-holes if you do not accept it jumping to the third-person at random intervals. This is seen most clearly, as Grisham does not hide any detail from the audience although some of this information is not made available to Luke.
One main part of any book is character development and in A Painted House, we see a lot of this occurring but other places where we are left wanting more. It starts with good intentions but slacks off so no one person is fully explored by Grisham but most central characters are prodded at, at certain times. Also, I feel the whole book is biased towards a particular side to each person’s character. By the end of the book, almost everyone can be neatly listed as good person or bad person; there are no grey areas. Perhaps, this is a deliberate; after all, it is being told through Luke and seven year olds tend to characterise people into good and bad with no room for being in the middle.
Before I began this book, I quickly skimmed a few reviews and the plot summary at the back to get the general gist of the story. I then thought to myself, there must be something else to it than a boy being a farmer in rural Arkansas and there was. As it says on the back cover, “transport Luke abruptly from childhood innocence to experience.”
This idea is not an original idea, from year dot, people have written about journeys from innocence to experience and coming-of-age stories. The problem I had with A Painted House, however, is that Luke doesn’t really change much. It’s not his fault, he only had six weeks and most of this time was spent picking cotton.
I got the impression Grisham was trying to force this issue to the front of everyone’s mind and spent a lot of time dwelling on Luke’s problems and secrets but the simple fact is Luke at the start of the novel and Luke at the end were the same person bar a few minor differences such as annoyance at the end of the baseball season. He did not mature in six weeks and 466 pages. He was pretty mature for a seven year old anyway and obviously experienced enough about farm life to get along but still very naïve about the outside world.
Moving on, the next points to note are the main parts of the book. The beginning, bulk and end. Starting, as with tradition, at the start, I cannot say I was immediately gripped. There was nothing to make me read on from the first few pages. In fact, I took longer to meander through the first hundred pages than I did to complete the next four hundred as it did dramatically improve. It is hammered into writers around the world that first impressions count but the whole plot does not lend itself to a great dramatic beginning leaving you wanting more.
The middle is good; I did not read one chapter that I think could’ve been omitted without damaging the book as a whole. This is not to say, every chapter was important but each one catalogued a mini-adventure of Luke’s that added to the novel.
The end was a mixture of feelings. In some ways, a story of someone’s life is going to end with boredom and the feeling you have read for days and achieved nothing; or will leave you wondering what happened to the people in the story.
These two contrasts are almost inevitable but I think Grisham gets the balance just right; there was not total closure but enough to leave you feeling content about your time invested in the book had not been wasted.
Overall, I think the book is in the good category. As many people have noted before me and will not again after me, John Grisham is quite unlikely to write a classic but will provide a good read for the casual bookworm. Incidentally, the last three books have been my favourite Grisham novels so I can only wait for the next selection and hope the trend continues.
A Painted House is available from all good bookshops for around £7. It is also available across the web for around the same price or your local library free of charge. For anyone who cares, the ISBN is 0-09-941615-8 and the book was published as a paperback in 2001. And according to The Times, it is “his best work.” I can’t help but agree.
shenanigans than with the roots of that country life which taught him much of what he knows about being human. In the early autumn of 1952, seven-year-old Luke Chandler is ...
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