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THE LEGAL LIMIT
by Martin Clark
Vintage, June 2009
416 pages
$15.00
ISBN: 0307388662


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Against considerable odds, Mason Hunt has become a model citizen. The best thing his father, who abused his children and bullied his wife, ever did for his family was to fail to come home from work one day, having sneaked off with another unfortunate woman. Finances were tight, but the beatings stopped. The two boys grew up into very different young men. Gates, who had ineffectively but valiantly tried to stand up to his father, was a popular high school football star and a college dropout who ended up sponging off his long-suffering mother. Mason, on the other hand, a star baseball player, parlayed his skills and his hard academic work into a college scholarship and eventually went on to law school. Now he is a Commonwealth attorney in his old home town, happily married to an artist, father of a little girl, and respected by all.

But years ago, when he was still in law school, he helped cover up his brother's involvement in a serious crime. He only succeeded in postponing the inevitable, for Gates is soon enough banged up on a drugs charge for an extraordinarily long time. And Mason can do nothing about it, a fact that Gates does not believe and about which he broods for years.

Martin Clark is a judge in Stuart, Virginia, having ascended to the bench at the precocious age of thirty-two, and makes it quite clear from the outset that this book arises out of his experiences in court. He is clearly a man who loves his town, his county, and the people who live in it, something that accounts for both the novel's greatest weaknesses as well as its considerable strengths.

By the time readers finish THE LEGAL LIMIT, they know Stuart VA intimately. Perhaps the landscape and architecture of the place are a bit vague, but the interior architecture, the social connections, the spoken and unspoken assumptions, the bonds and the animosities are all crystal clear. So too is Mason's life history, his sorrows and his (somewhat muted) joys. Other characters are also carefully developed and have a claim on our attention and concern.

But this is no expose of the seamy underside of life in rural southern Virginia, though it has its share of dubious folk. Nobody is really that bad except, of course, for Gates. When he appears, the novel snaps into life in a way that it doesn't otherwise quite do. As he is off stage for most of the way, the book, entertaining as it is, lacks the tension and the edge that mark a truly unforgettable thriller. It does raise some interesting questions about guilt and responsibility, fate and free will, and the law of unintended consequences, though it neither belabours nor exhausts them. And it exploits a curious, if a bit obscure, point of law. But his affection for his characters leads him to dally on his way to a resolution of the plot and to engage in the pursuit of some secondary issues which, while intriguing, have little bearing on the main event. Perhaps Clark would be wise next time out either to focus more narrowly on crime and punishment or to abandon the genre in favour of the gentle celebration of his hometown that he clearly wants to write.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, May 2009

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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