I just finished reading "The Testament" by John Grisham.You can find literature in the unlikeliest of places and I have come to believe is not only a work of literature that is if you use my definition of the words which is to describe all work that edifies as literature. Nobility is found in this book of Grisham in the person of the principal character of the story Rachel Lane and her acceptance and trust in Nate O’Riley, a chronic alcoholic who has been through rehabilitation at least four times and is forever living on the edge of a cliff.
In the book, Rachel Lane is a missionary living among remote Indian tribes in Brazil’s and also an illegitimate daughter of a philandering billionaire who has willed her most of hi fortune. But Rachel living in primitive conditions in the Brazilian Rain Forest has no interest in the money and is totally to the initiatives of Nate O’Riley the lawyer, who needs her signature to have the Will executed.
Surrounded as Nate and his law firm is by the other legitimate half siblings of Rachel who live in a world where money and the good things of life is everything, Rachel’s life style and disdain for the billions that she has inherited come through as surreal to the lawyer who has made his own money buy suing doctors for unethical malpractice and by making numerous trade offs in his personal ethics on that route. In a man like him, who himself was hard put to find any thing good in his own life, Rachel was the first person in decades to see some thing good in him, and then going on to walk her talk, she put her trust in him and his intents that he would not betray her trust.
To me the story in John Grisham’s The Testamant is not about Rachel and Nate and chasing wills or even the beautifully described topography of the Pantanal region of the Brazilian Rain Forest, it is about the conclusions drawn and the statements made about never losing hope in the hidden goodness of man and because of that goodness, there is the ability to trust, to take risks as you trust. Finally of course, without getting unduly preachy Near the book’s end, Rachel Lane the missionary dies of malaria and is buried by the Indians among whom she lived and died and who the worldly wise lawyer Nate O’Riley describes as the bravest person he had ever met because she had absolutely no fear of death because she walked daily with the one who had conquered it in the resurrection.
There is no romance in this book, no sleaze, no sex. But reverberating through when the book finally ends is the fragrant underlining of the fact that good lies in every life however darkened by smoke and soot it might have become. That if you go searching for it, sooner or rather often later, you find it and the beauty in each human soul can be chiseled out if only one would make the effort and have the persistence to go on and on. And that effort is the one that converts a man into a missionary.
In the book, Rachel Lane is a missionary living among remote Indian tribes in Brazil’s and also an illegitimate daughter of a philandering billionaire who has willed her most of hi fortune. But Rachel living in primitive conditions in the Brazilian Rain Forest has no interest in the money and is totally to the initiatives of Nate O’Riley the lawyer, who needs her signature to have the Will executed.
Surrounded as Nate and his law firm is by the other legitimate half siblings of Rachel who live in a world where money and the good things of life is everything, Rachel’s life style and disdain for the billions that she has inherited come through as surreal to the lawyer who has made his own money buy suing doctors for unethical malpractice and by making numerous trade offs in his personal ethics on that route. In a man like him, who himself was hard put to find any thing good in his own life, Rachel was the first person in decades to see some thing good in him, and then going on to walk her talk, she put her trust in him and his intents that he would not betray her trust.
To me the story in John Grisham’s The Testamant is not about Rachel and Nate and chasing wills or even the beautifully described topography of the Pantanal region of the Brazilian Rain Forest, it is about the conclusions drawn and the statements made about never losing hope in the hidden goodness of man and because of that goodness, there is the ability to trust, to take risks as you trust. Finally of course, without getting unduly preachy Near the book’s end, Rachel Lane the missionary dies of malaria and is buried by the Indians among whom she lived and died and who the worldly wise lawyer Nate O’Riley describes as the bravest person he had ever met because she had absolutely no fear of death because she walked daily with the one who had conquered it in the resurrection.
There is no romance in this book, no sleaze, no sex. But reverberating through when the book finally ends is the fragrant underlining of the fact that good lies in every life however darkened by smoke and soot it might have become. That if you go searching for it, sooner or rather often later, you find it and the beauty in each human soul can be chiseled out if only one would make the effort and have the persistence to go on and on. And that effort is the one that converts a man into a missionary.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment