Buckley’s Mix

Manichean Nation

Posted July 31, 2009, 11:07 ET Comments Off

In idle moments I am reading Henry Cecil, roughly Jane Austen for English barristers. Cecil is not very well known here, but I enjoy him. Nothing deep, simply a deeply honest and not unwitty fellow. No villains either, but rather the run-of-the mill larceny of one’s clients and the laziness of opposing counsel. The most typical kind of mistake is one where a lawyer makes a strategic blunder by being too much a gentelman.

I don’t read U.S. lawyer novels, but can understand why Cecil doesn’t sell over here. Instead, we have the John Grishams, where the message is one of a Manichean world, one lonely hero against a very evil world. I suspect that the appeal here is to narcissism. We are invited to see ourselves as the hero, a lone beacon of honor in a corrupt world, a world that scorns us, that does not love us, as much as our mother did in any event…

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