Camino Ghosts: Book Review

 

John Grisham’s Latest Camino Installment is Dull and Anticlimactic

I just finished reading Camino Ghosts from John Grisham. It’s the third version of this plucky group of literary nerds who summer on an island (Camino) off the Atlantic side of Florida. Grisham doesn’t do a lot of serial type books. He doesn’t have a hero the way Lee Child (Jack Reacher) or Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch) do. But the subject matter is as different as the pacing. Jake Brigance from A Time To Kill would be his closest serial. He’s done 3 stories that I’m aware of. But Brigance isn’t exactly racing around the globe rescuing hostages or fomenting revolution in a South American country.

He’s basically a pro bono lawyer in a country town in Southern Mississippi. Not exactly riveting stuff. It’s great story telling though. I enjoyed the small-town politics and legal wrangling. We learn how the system works and how it doesn’t. We root for the accused.

The Camino stories don’t have the same rich texture. It feels like I should care more about the people in it, but I don’t.

Breakdown and Criticism

Camino Ghosts would have been better as a short story. The first 1/3 felt like an interesting yarn, so I kept going. It flattened out and settled to the bottom like week old Coca Cola after that. The last third was rushed through and summarized like a made for TV movie stuffing in an ending right before a commercial break. It’s almost like he got halfway done doing research and decided it wasn’t worth his time and handed it off to a junior writer to finish by the deadline.

The most compelling thing about the Camino Island crew is how fun it would be to live there and go to their parties. Telling stories about a small group of boozy eccentrics is what holds this series together. The eager book seller (Bruce Cable) with the big contacts and the young author/professor Mercer Mann and her new husband Thomas. A crew of fellow writers and retired busybodies fills out the rest of the island set. Written in an easy, breezy style, their life on the island is focused on books and causes.

Outline Summary

In the early 17^th century, an unknown village in West Africa is raided and the people are sold as slaves by another tribe. Both slave traders and raiding party’s treat the villagers horribly. The women are raped and beaten. The men are either killed outright or separated from the women on the march to the sea. The conditions on the ships are even worse. Stiflingly hot and disease ridden, many die in the tight airless spaces before the ship arrives with its slaves. One particular ship crashes near Florida in a storm. The captured Africans revolt against their captors and escape to a tiny island, Dark Isle. The White slavers are executed in a voodoo ceremony by a captured woman named Nalla. The curse, White men can never set foot on the island and live to tell about it.

Lovely Jackson is the last descendent of the people from Dark Isle. She moved to Camino Island when she was just 15. No one has lived there since. The island is hers. A big developer wants to set up condos on the island but needs permission from the state of Florida. Lovely claims ownership. Tidal Breeze, the developer, needs to disprove her theory of ownership. They have a lot of money and powerful friends. Lovely has the crew from Camino and their vast eclectic mix of writers and environmental lawyers designed to stop corporate development. She needs to prove she owns it to stop the builders.

Any description of the slave trade and its barbarity should force a kind of revulsion in the reader. This description is no different. It’s partly what made me think the story would take rough ride like the crossing that the slave ship endured. Mostly it devolved into a dull summation of the legal questions and Lovely’s memory. The stakes were very low. I kept thinking that the worst case scenario was the developers win the case to build on the island and Lovely dies a few years later. She was in her 80s. It’s not exactly a disaster.

Conservation Angle

For all the camaraderie of the liberal writing crew and their desire to keep the greedy bastards out, someone developed the island they live on. I never fully sympathize with conservationists; most already have their property. The attitude is always, go find your piece of land somewhere else. They love to move in the middle of nowhere and keep everyone else out. I understand the impetus, no one wants a highway or an apartment building near their spread, but it’s not “evil” or “corrupt” to want to develop. In either case, we root for Lovely and the protection of her homeland. Grisham makes a good case legally and emotionally that’s easy for the reader to follow.

I wonder if John Grisham made the connection that Bruce and Mercer and Thomas and the crew were helping themselves more than Lovely. They wouldn't have wanted the development any more than her. For all of their efforts, the real winners would be the ones who live on Camino Island. 

Conclusion

Hoping for a quick end to the story after getting halfway through is a sign your book is too boring. In the end I just didn’t care. It was like being promised an action packed movie with violence and ancient curses and being shown some old photos of the island instead. Not exactly a bait and switch, but it was much flatter than promised.