When
I first looked at the blurb on the back and read about the Cardinals
trailing the Dodgers, I was not too optimistic as I am not, by any
stretch of the imagination, a baseball fan; however, although
baseball runs like a red thread through the book, it is completely
incidental to the main theme.
The
main theme concerns a family of cotton growers in Arkansas. Cotton
growing means cotton picking, and for the picking extra hands are
recruited from Mexico in the south; even the hill people sign on for
a couple of months' picking. The mix is not without its tension; it
is the tension that creates the story.
A
Painted House
is narrated by seven-year-old Luke. The blurb tells us that the novel
is inspired by Grisham's own childhood in Arkansas, but to what
extent Grisham's experiences actually parallel Luke's is difficult to
say.
Luke's
innocence may
be
meant to act as
a foil to the violence unfolding around him; however,
seven-year-old Luke comes
across as being much older and much more knowing than one would
expect of a child growing
up in
the early 1950s. It
is unbelievable that a child of that age (and that era) would have
been sexually aroused by the sight of a seventeen-year-old girl, and
it is equally unbelievable that that same child would have spent time
mentally trying to erase the age difference in the hope of some kind
of permanent relationship a little further down the track. This
is an
uncomfortable discord that
impacts
somewhat
negatively
on the novel as a whole.
However,
the book,
like most of Grisham's books, is easy to read and does
manage to
retain the reader's interest. Apart from the story surrounding
Luke and his family,
the novel manages to paint a very believable picture of life in the
cotton-growing south during the 1950s. Life is obviously
unbelievably
hard, and the one light
point in the whole week is the cinema house on a Saturday afternoon
– everything else is steeped in hard work where dreams can
quickly become disappointments and where the weather is irrational
and not on the side of the cotton farmers. Even service at
the Baptist Chapel on Sunday mornings has an aura of 'hard work',
especially for a seven-year-old boy. In
the far background, the Korean War casts
its own
shadow over the community, also
emphasizing
the central
theme
that life is not easy.
Most
people seem to accept their lot; perhaps
they are
so entrenched in the routines of planting, picking and
disappointments that they are unable to envisage any other life.
Others,
like Luke's parents – his mother in particular – know
that there is
a
better
life, with better
being completely relative.
The
book contains humour, tension, suspense and sadness, and
even though it is at times difficult to say where the line goes
between reality and imagination most things in the book seem at least vaguely
possible.