Classic Review: A Time to Kill

Don’t be fooled by the opening few chapters of John Grisham’s A Time to Kill. Or, for that matter, by the pithy gobbets from the critics that invariably grace its covers. For A Time to Kill is not quite the über-thriller you might expect from Grisham, the king of the legal-drama, whose status thus is secured in perpetuity by the purchase power of an army of businessmen and holidaymakers alike. While the early pages of the novel bombard you with scenes of near-unbearable violence and their brutal repercussions – a young girl is raped by two rednecks, her father guns them down- what ensues is a far more measured, often painstaking portrait of a small town in Mississippi and the nuances of legal proceedings in a capital murder trial.
To accommodate this level of legal detail, Grisham’s passages are short and he frequently switches location or adds new characters. This stretches the flabby plot to the point of exhaustion. However, Grisham does just about manage to hang his digressions and vignettes upon central protagonist, upstart defence lawyer Jake Brigance. Brigance is suitably distasteful so as to be compelling.

Yet while the book makes for a flawed thriller, what nudges it towards status as a classic is arguably its portrayal of racial tension.

Almost (and I stress almost) more shocking than the initial scenes of violence is the novel’s deployment of a language of racial divide. Grisham’s frequent and near gratuitous use of a particular word, the worst of racial slurs, a word that has both killed careers and been embraced by Gangsta rap, is an interesting call for a white author to have made. On the one hand it may be necessary for verisimilitude, many of his characters are meant to be unequivocally racist. On the other it could be seen as perpetuating a certain cycle of representation, not least when Grisham’s black characters themselves use it self-referentially.
Ultimately, it is part and parcel of an impression that the novel is set in a town whose attitudes are lagging behind the times. Indeed perhaps the most inappropriate words in the English language are in this instance the most appropriate. After all, race (and racism) determines class in the novel, it determines social standing and it may even determine whether vigilante father Carl Lee Hailey lives or dies. Maybe it is inevitable, if not necessary, that it, too, determines the novel’s vocabulary.