Icon: enlarge
Author Moore: The better story wins
Photo:
Matt Sayles / Eichborn
It could be so simple: The substitute teacher Bobby Nock, a 24-year-old black man, has an affair with his 15-year-old student Jessica Silver, the daughter of one of the richest men in Los Angeles.
When she threatens to make their relationship public, Bobby kills her and makes her body disappear.
Bobby has a motive, even if questionable, no alibi and no lobby whatsoever - a clear case for a murder conviction, even without a corpse.
Something like this happens every day in the US courtrooms, and the judicial apparatus also contributes to systemic racism.
It is a little different in Graham Moore's new novel Denial.
He talks about how court proceedings are not actually about the truth, but about the more plausible narrative, and how the prosecution and defense only use the facts and weave into their narrative that fits.
The better story wins, and all too often the truth is not the best possible strategy.
"The lawyers on both sides," Moore describes a lawsuit, "did what they could to win, they shot out of hand - and whatever was left in the crowd of broken limbs was then called justice."
The logical perpetrator
The focus of the story is Maya Seale, who was the decisive juror in the 2009 trial of Bobby Knock.
She doubted that the teacher was a murderer and gradually drew all of the jury to her side.
One half of the novel, which jumps between the past and the present, tells how she finally gets an acquittal and what consequences this has not only for her.
more on the subject
Icon: Spiegel PlusIcon: Spiegel PlusBest-selling author Delia Owens: The woman who sells more books than John Grisham and Stephen KingBy Philipp Oehmke
Today Maya has become a successful lawyer from former juror.
But soon a new role is forced upon her: the murder suspect.
Rick Leonard is murdered while the jury meets while filming a true crime series.
Maya is the logical perpetrator.
Not only was she the last to see him, she also had a brief relationship with Rick ten years ago that broke up over a heated argument over the verdict.
While her lawyer bases his defense strategy on Maya killing Rick in self-defense, she tries to find out the truth on her own.
Maya is convinced that if she can determine what really happened in 2009, then she will find Rick's killer too.
Graham Moore, author of the Oscar-winning screenplay for "The Imitation Game - A Top Secret Life", already showed in 2010 with his debut novel "The Man Who Killed Sherlock Holmes" that he understands the rules of classic crime thriller and how to ( much less radical than the series »Sherlock«) modernized.
With "denial" he is entering a terrain that has been dominated by John Grisham for decades: the court thriller.
And Moore doesn't have to hide from the old master.
In the tradition of "Chinatown"
Neither in terms of the build-up of tension, nor the way in which Moore integrates topicalities - "refusal" has a lot to say about "race" and "class" - without the novel ever getting anything thesetical.
On the plot level, the book works perfectly, the plot with punch lines and cliffhangers is in place, Moore makes maximum narrative capital from the initial situation.
display
Graham Moore
refusal
Published by Eichborn
translated by: André Mumot
Number of pages: 400
Published by Eichborn
translated by: André Mumot
Number of pages: 400
Buy for € 22.00
Price query time
12/29/2020 9:05 p.m.
No guarantee
Icon: Info
Order at AmazonIcon: amazon
Order from ThaliaIcon: thalia
Product reviews are purely editorial and independent.
Via the so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when making a purchase.
More information here
But Moore wants even more, wants to show how America has changed over the past ten years, how the country under Trump has lost much of the hope of the Obama years and a new attitude of “If you are not for me, you are against mich «, which Moore compares with the binary of the judicial system and its mechanics of guilty or innocent, which hardly allow any nuances.
In order to build a thematic and temporal bridge, Moore's narrative mastery is also evident here, he needs little more than a "Hope" button that Maya carried on her pocket in 2009 and which now - actually as a prop for the true crime Production thought - where the dead is found.
Telling a lot with just a few strokes, giving the characters depth and not making complex structures look too complicated, Moore has mastered this art almost perfectly.
And so he apparently tells another story, which is in the tradition of Roman Polanski's legendary neo-noir "Chinatown": of Los Angeles and the corruption in the heart of the city, which is not deviation, but inherent in the system.
The greed for profit that has been destroying the city since the 1940s and demanding new victims.
And although the grievances are known, nothing will change about it, Moore shows: “The blue sky over Los Angeles looked forever young, yes, downright primeval - the same color today, the same color tomorrow, exactly the same shade of blue that it was ten Years ago, that afternoon when a young girl disappeared. "
Icon: The mirror