Review: Vivien Horler

A Calamity of Souls, by David Baldacci (Macmillan)

It is always a pleasure to come across a hefty courtroom drama, well plotted and well written. A good story to immerse yourself in.

A Calamity of Souls is one of those. And you don’t have to take my word for it – there are shouts on the cover from such luminaries as Michael Connelly, Ken Follett and Scott Turow.

Turow says this may be the best novel Baldacci has ever written (and he’s written a lot), while Connelly says: “This is David Baldacci at his best: using the law and the courtroom as the stage for a searing parable on race, and the cost and courage to do the right thing.”

It is set in Virginia in 1968 at a time of much racial tension in the US. Jack Lee is a small-town white lawyer who has been brought up to respect all races equally. But he is the exception.

The town is reeling from the news that a well-known elderly white couple have been stabbed to death in their home. And now their black odd-job man, Jerome Washington, has been arrested for murder.

With racial feelings running high, Jerome’s grandmother-in-law, who worked for Jack’s parents years previously, begs him to represent him.

Jack’s mother is appalled at his decision to agree, and she’s not the only one. One evening four burly white men call at his office and inform him they’ve come “to convince one of our own to be loyal to his kind”.

Jack says he’s going to call the police, but one of the guys tells him the police know they’re there, and they’re not coming. The men start beating him up.

Jack gets out of that situation in a way that might impress Donald Trump.

But he’s ambivalent about taking the case. He’s worried about his family and his mentally challenged sister, and he’s also concerned he might not be good enough to do justice to Jerome – he’s never defended an accused in a murder case before.

Then there’s another knock on his door, and a tall black woman, professionally dressed and carrying a briefcase, is on the step.

She is Desiree DuBose, and she tells him she might be the answer to his prayers. It turns out she went to Yale Law School where she had been an editor of the Law School Review. She currently works for the Legal Defense Fund, and has handled over two dozen capital murder cases, winning more than she’s lost.

She’ll take over the case, she says. Jack demurs, but they eventually agree to be Jerome’s co-counsel. Now at least Jerome has a chance.

And so the scene is set, with plenty of twists and turns to come, and a shocking ending.

In a note at the beginning of this novel Baldacci says he started writing it over 10 years ago. He grew up in Richmond, Virginia, with an ethnic surname in a world steeped in the history of the Deep South. His sixth grade class was one of the first in Virginia to be bused to a black school, in terms of the US Supreme Court’s Brown vs Board of Education ruling that held racially segregated education was unconstitutional.

“Thinking back, I believe I would not have become a writer had I not been born in that place and at that time.”

The casual racism is everywhere in many of the loathesome people in this novel. When Jack first goes to see Jerome in prison, a guard tells him: “Every colored comes in this place got Washington or Jefferson as their last name. Know why?”

When Jack says he doesn’t, the guard explains: “Cause they don’t know who their daddy is and they just pick themselves a president.”

In a paragraph that could have come straight from the apartheid playbook, Baldacci writes: “Jack lived in a world that had been sliced into halves that were termed separate but equal. However, even to an ignorant or a shameless eye, those halves never came within shouting distance of parity. Whether it was buses or bathrooms or water fountains or places of learning or praying or where you’d raise your knife and fork, there was ‘us’ and there was ‘them’ and the lines were drawn starkly, if not in any way purely.”

Baldacci adds he wanted to make this a story of two people from divergent life experiences who come together to tackle a problem as difficult as any America has ever confronted. “I wanted it to be an unwieldy, fractious partnership, like the one experienced by those sixth graders decades ago.

“I wanted each to learn from the other, and for them to eventually find mutual respect and empathy for one another. In the end, what can we strive for that is more vital, for all of us?”

There is a lot about bigotry and racism in this book, but while it is thought-provoking, A Calamity of Souls is not an extended sermon – it’s a bloody good read.