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The analysis of "The Client" by John Grisham
enchanting. In this novel the world is seen through the eyes of a little boy, Mark has to fight his fear, to suffer the consequences of his impulsive step, and the desire to find out what will happen next to this child keeps the reader turning the pages: Mark Sway and Ricky, three years his junior brother, are sharing a forbidden cigarette when a chance encounter with a suicidal lawyer Jerome Clifford leaves Mark knowing a bloody secret: the whereabouts of the most sought-after dead body in America, the body of the senator Boyd Boyette, killed by the gangster of New Orleans Barry the Blade Muldanno. Mark’s life has never been easy, but it will become even harder, it will change irreversibly, menacing alterations and enormous danger are waiting for him. Life is always a big surprise.
MARK WAS ELEVEN AND HAD BEEN SMOKING OFF AND ON for two years, never trying to quit but being careful not to get hooked. He preferred Kools, his ex-father’s brand, but his mother smoked Virginia Slims at the rate of two packs a day, and he could in an average week pilfer ten or twelve from her. She was a busy woman with many problems, perhaps a little naive when it came to her boys, and she never dreamed her eldest would be smoking at the age of eleven. (pg. 1)
With such an exposition John Grisham starts his enthralling novel - “The Client”. It opens with a neat hook into the reader’s jaw - and the tension never weavers - as the author strives for a knockout suspenser with echoes of Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson - or at least the reader can not help weighing what he is reading against the darker plots that enmesh Huck Finn and Jim Hawkins. Instead of pirates Mark Sway is thrown among lawyers and murderers. Already the first paragraphs of the book hit the reader hard and make him anticipate for something staggering, abrupt, maybe even dreadful to happen. Mark Sway who appears to be an ordinary street child full of vices is far away from being a boy who knows only smoking, drugs and alcohol in the life. The first lines of the novel are very delusive: on the contrary - Mark is a decent, kind-hearted, spiritually rich and extraordinary boy, drugs and alcohol are the biggest vices for him and he is determined to avoid them: “Their ex-father was an alcoholic who’d beaten both boys and their mother, and the beatings always followed the nasty bouts with beer. Mark had seen and felt the effects of alcohol. He was also afraid of drugs.” (pg. 2)
This little boy, smoking in solitude is more than the son of his mother, Dianne Sway, he is her defender, her intercessor, her only prop; she has sought refuge and advice from her eldest son when the whole family was suffering from the attacks of the despot father. Mark is more mature than any kid of his age, and it would [next page]