A meeting in the jungle

In Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the first-person narrator is dead before the novel even begins. John Grisham doesn't quite manage this in his latest offering, but his narrator does last only until the end of Chapter Two. He is Troy Phelan, self-made billionaire and the 10th richest man in America. Old, bored and no longer interested in the things untold wealth can buy, he does a nose-dive off the 14th floor of his company building, landing with a consequent splatter on the pavement far below.

A man who always indulged himself, he has had three wives and raised three families. The first union was with frigid Lillian, a woman who "rarely let me touch her", yet by whom he had four children. Then there was sensuous Janie, with whom he had two more offspring, although one of them, Rocky by name, managed to kill himself by wrapping his sports car round a tree.

Finally, at the age of 64, he married 23-year-old Tira and inspired her to generate Ramble, 14 when the story opens and already with one arrest for shop-lifting and another for possession of marijuana under his belt.

They are all present and accounted for in other parts of the building when husband and father does his swan dive. And why are they there?

Well, like vultures circling round a hoped-for corpse, they are eager to scoop up the goodies which they believe will be left to them when old Troy does his last samba with Beelzebub.

But they are in for a seismic shock, for at the last moment the canny old tycoon cuts them completely out of his will and instead leaves all of his worldly goods to an illegitimate daughter called Rachel Lane. So who is this Rachel and, more importantly, where is she?

Well, to answer these questions, Mr Grisham brings forth yet another of those brilliant though flawed advocates that are his stock-in-trade. This one is called Nate O'Riley, a Washington attorney who was once a class-act litigator but has now fallen from the straight and narrow because of his love for good liquor and bad women.

Phelan's lawyer, a wise old grey-beard named Josh Stafford, decides to give Nate one last chance, and dispatches him to the jungles of Brazil on foot of a rumour that Rachel is living there with an obscure Indian tribe known as the Ipicas.

In fact, Rachel is a born-again Christian and a member of World Tribe Missions, a group that brings the word of God to remote communities. Needless to say, she places no value on her father's millions, so it is up to Nate to stir her interest so that her monster siblings will not get their hands on all those lovely spondulicks and waste it in riotous living.

While attempting to impress the charms of Mammon upon clean-living Rachel, Nate himself begins to undergo a sea-change. He loses his thirst for John Barleycorn, and renounces the sins of the flesh. The beauty of the Pantanal, a vast and remote area in Brazil, lifts the darkness from his heart - "Mistah Kurtz - he dead" - and, like Rousseau who, except for his chronic constipation, would have been a happy man, he begins to extol the way of life of the Noble Savage.

While this exorcism in the wild is going on, the other would-be inheritors are goading their wily lawyers to blast Phelan's last will and testament apart. So the book operates on two levels, the quasi-religious one and the materialistic, let's-get-our-hands-on the-dough one. Neither one generated enough tension or suspense to keep me from nodding off on numerous occasions.

Mr Grisham's great strength as a writer is his ability to tell a story and to keep it bounding along so that the reader has difficulty keeping pace. He did that to great effect in The Firm, The Client and in what I consider is his best book, The Runaway Jury. In The Testament it appears as if his mind is on higher things, such as why we are here, destiny, and all that jazz. As any lawyer worth his salt will tell him, all that is secondary to raking in the shekels.

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