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June 29, 2012
Legal system as a protagonist
Fiction writers’ work experience makes for superb story
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
Really good reads. That would be the simplest way to describe the books reviewed by the Jewish Independent for this Canada Day special issue: Life Without by former Toronto teacher and now Vancouver writer Ken Klonsky (Quattro Books) and Stray Bullets by Toronto lawyer and crime novelist Robert Rotenberg (Simon and Schuster Canada).
Klonsky’s Life Without is compelling to say the least. Avid readers will finish it in one sitting, and not only because it’s a relatively short 120 pages. Klonsky’s prose is a work of art. He creates a main character whose naiveté and apathy are palpable, so much so that you want to reach into the book and slap some sense into him, scream at him to wake up and see what is going on around him.
The novel centres around Joel Ascher, a brilliant young man from an upper-middle-class family who could have been anything in life but has chosen instead to become a taxi driver and an online poker player. It opens with the recounting of a dream, Joel wandering through a hotel’s corridors with a lawyer, knocking on doors: more than once, Joel wonders something along the lines of, “My supposed lawyer stares back at me, waiting for me to tell him what to do. Isn’t he supposed to be leading me?” They eventually enter a room that “looks as if a party or a meeting has taken place. Empty liquor bottles are arrayed on the floor. Ashtrays.” Joel wakes up gasping for air, sobbing, remembering that he’s “lost something vital.” His cries are met with expletive-full calls for him to shut up, followed by an angry exchange between his fellow prisoners.
Readers are brought into Joel’s world immediately and violently. Klonsky then introduces Joel’s inept, and possibly corrupt, lawyer, Fiedler, whose relationship with Joel was aptly portrayed in Joel’s dream. As the narrative continues, we eventually find out that Joel has been sentenced to life in prison without the option of parole – “or life without, as prisoners call it” – for supposedly stabbing his pregnant wife to death. But, like Albert Camus’ Meursault in L’Etranger, who was convicted more for not crying at his mother’s funeral than for murdering a man, Joel is found guilty on such evidence as witnesses testifying that he expressed anger at his wife outside a furniture store and that he made fun of her at a restaurant, not to mention his love of opera.
Life Without has many layers and, in its brief pages, it is a harsh critique – although with humor – of the legal system, how it profits from prisoners and how all the players (police, lawyers, judges, witnesses, prison guards, prisoners, private investigators) have incentives not conducive to fairness or justice, as well as society and its base, the family, as Joel is abandoned by his parents and betrayed by his brother. Yet, throughout, Joel clings to the belief that some evidence will magically appear that will exonerate him. While this hope offers comfort to Joel, it underscores the hopelessness of his situation, and a feeling of frustration and sadness will stay with readers long after they finish Life Without, especially knowing that Joel’s situation is based on reality – Klonsky co-authored Dr. Rubin Carter’s Eye of the Hurricane and works with Innocence International, an organization created by Carter to help free wrongly convicted prisoners.
Stray Bullets also focuses on the legal system and its potential for corruption, while being a much-lighter read. It also captures reality though, and Rotenberg explores several serious issues – for example, illegal immigration, the role of the media in criminal cases and the pressure to convict someone for a crime, even if it’s not the right person – and he doesn’t shy away from the inherent unfairness of fate, as most evidenced by his choice of victim for his third Detective Ari Greene novel: a four-year-old boy who gets hit by a stray bullet fired during a lovers’ quarrel.
Rotenberg makes it very clear who are the villains and heroes, and readers will know who actually fired the fatal shots early on in the story, but Stray Bullets is still a page-turner. Whether or not Greene will be able to prove who committed the murder in the midst of public pressure to close the case, varying witness testimony, the machinations of an ambitious crown attorney and other factors – including the one eye-witness who, being in Canada illegally, disappears right after the shots are fired – propels the narrative. Greene is a very likable character, as is recurring character Nancy Parish, a defence attorney who, in this instance, is put in the position of defending a man that most people have already decided is a child-killer.
In an interview with bookclubbuddy.com, Rotenberg points to the real-life shooting in Toronto of Jane Creba on Boxing Day in 2005 as the inspiration for his latest novel. Knowing the lawyers involved, Rotenberg recalled one of them saying, a few days before the verdict, that he feared the jury would focus on the fact that a teenage girl was killed while out shopping with her family “‘and won’t be able to see beyond that.’
“It sent a chill down my spine,” said Rotenberg.
In addition, Rotenberg said about his research for Stray Bullets: “I spent a day in the old newspaper section of the Toronto Reference Library reading all the papers from Dec. 26-31, 2005. And I cried.” Rotenberg’s compassion, his writing ability and his insider knowledge of the legal system combine to excellent effect in this novel.
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