Murder, middle age and a myriad voices

THERE were large sections of this book that I found almost impossible to read. These are the parts where Mr Turow gives us his version of ethnic speech rhythms - most likely quite accurate; after all, what do I know? We have black person speak, China person speak, Latino person speak, cop speak, lawyer speak, judge speak all those different intonations, inflections, rap words, slang words; I felt as if I'd fallen into a Benetton ad where the multiplicity of colours had been provided with tongues and were wagging.

The plot - wouldn't you know? - is concerned with a murder trial. June Eddgar, ex wife of a well known politician, is gunned down in a crime and drug ridden part of the city. One Hardcore, a local homeboy, is arrested for the killing but agrees to give state's evidence and testifies that the woman's son, Nile, hired him to carry out the contract.

His father, Loyell Eddgar, a senator with a radical past, also seems convinced that his son is implicated. He himself is a bit of a whited sepulchre, on the surface a man of peace and reconciliation, inside still harbouring the desire, for violent upheaval of the status quo and prepared to enlist such as Hardcore and his band of drug pushers - including a black girl of surpassing beauty who, like Hurricane Lily, is great at blowing - to carry out his anti social designs.

The judge in, the case is Sonia (Sonny) Klonsky, a former prominent prosecutor - she figured as such in Turow's second novel, The Burden of Proof - who is approaching 50 but still has juice in her tank: when we first meet her she is entering her chambers after doing her shopping and we are informed that "she remains vaguely conscious of six summer nectarines she picked by hand whose cool flawless skin and sensuous cleft woke her unpredictably - comically - to some semblance of longing". Who knows what goes on under those sober, almost sacerdotal, robes?

Sonny herself was a bit of a hell raiser in her campus days, and actually lived in the same apartment house as the Eddgars then. Also part of her life at that time was Seth Weissman who, under the name Michael Frain, pens a controversial column in the syndicated newspapers and, surprise, surprise, is present in the press box when the trial of Nile Eddgar begins.

But that's not all, folks. The defence lawyer, Hobie Tuttle, turns out to have helped the elder Eddgar's friends to blow up a lab experimenting with chemical weapons for use against the Viet Cong. In any country but American the lot of them would have had to confess conflict of interest and bar themselves from having anything to do with the case.

However, if one is willing to suspend disbelief and accept the more bizarre aspects of events, the trial itself, when it breaks into a gallop, is full of twists, turns and startling revelations. Pity things didn't end with the trial, as the bits that Turow has to add on to tie up all the strands of his very complicated plot prove to be quite - awkward and have that unfinished appearance of plasters stuck on to a wound that is still bleeding.

One of the questions which the book asks, and which I've always found of interest, is what happens to the iconoclasts of former decades when they hit the pain barrier of middle age. In this case, we are viewing those flower powered, LSD charged children of the Sixties, the ones who advocated free - love, commune living and finding the answer blowin' in the wind. Have they contributed to the nastiness of the Nineties or does each generation have to search out its own moral level ground, or lack of it?

"Thass a tale, man. Might be fat, could be fat, we kickin' some serious shit here!" according to Hardcore man about town, homespun philosopher, urban guerrilla, and general, all purpose killer. {CORRECTION} 96112600003