Once again the anonymous author takes us deep into the chaotic world of criminal courts, says Thomas Grant from The Times.
It is said that in the world of publishing the celebrity memoir is in decline. In place of shininess and self-assurance is the search for authentic voices at the sharp end of human experience. Real people doing, and suffering, in the real world.
Even in the legal sphere that trend is evident. The autobiographies of Michael Mansfield and Geoffrey Robertson — the closest the barrister’s profession has come to celebrity in recent years — were required reading for the student lawyers of an earlier generation. Now, in place of legal titans regaling us with their magnificent defences or reciting the milestones of a triumphant career, we have the anxieties and dilemmas of junior barristers struggling on poor pay and little sleep.
Self-deprecation, a pervading sense of doubt, burn-out: these are the leitmotifs of the new genre. Added to it is the latest book from the anonymous blogger the Secret Barrister, Nothing But the Truth. The SB’s productivity has been prodigious. The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken was published to universal acclaim in 2018. Just two years later, out came Fake Law: The Truth about Justice in an Age Of Lies. But what is there new to say?
The pitch of Nothing but the Truth is more straightforwardly autobiographical. The book has been marketed as a “tell-all” memoir, which is rather wide of the mark. The perceived necessity to maintain SB’s veil of anonymity means that not only is their name never revealed, their sex, the city in which they work and the identity of their chambers are also carefully concealed. This tends to blunt the reader’s sense of SB as a person. Broadly drawn and attractive character traits emerge: SB is vastly conscientious, desperate to do the right thing, and self-punishing when they make mistakes.But the lineaments remain hazy — SB was aptly described to me by one barrister as the Zorro of the criminal bar — and SB presents as a sort of every(wo)man, an archetype rather than a fully fledged person.
Let it be said immediately: the SB is a gifted writer. Words tumble out with extraordinary fluency. Deft metaphors catch the eye and phrases remain lodged in the memory. One defendant’s campaign of delinquency is described as a “seemingly unstoppable carousel of criminality”. The private language of lawyers in a courtroom is like a “spectacle which all the actors understand, but which is wholly incomprehensible to the audience, like performing Brecht to a room of dachshunds”. The experience of appearing in front of certain particularly choleric judges is described as “an exercise in disabling a highly temperamental car alarm, randomly shrieking at you out of nowhere as you weep, ‘What have I done to deserve this?’”
The SB’s picaresque journey to barristerhood is served up with large helpings of humour. We meet Alan, the cynical but kindly pupil supervisor. Alan is too busy to write his reference for the SB’s post-pupillage application to join his chambers as a tenant so he suggests that the SB do it instead and Alan will simply sign it — the SB demurs. There is also Paula, the all-powerful clerk, three-piece suit-wearing know-it-all toffs braying about their connections; a litany of irascible judges.
Much of the humour is self-directed. While prosecuting in one court, the SB sets out the facts of the case against the defendant, who is watching over a video link from prison. “It’s all bullshit,” the lag shouts. “You liar. I didn’t do it.” The judge eventually orders the link to be cut. She turns back to the SB who shamefacedly admits: “Um, Your Honour? I was reading from the wrong file.”
Strict chronological impetus is rightly jettisoned for a tapestry of the chaotic and the absurd. Nothing works in the courts the SB appears at. DVD players break down. Police officers unaccountably lose evidence. It is a wonder any trials ever reach a verdict. People do mad things. A client is charged with having intercourse with a chicken; it turns out that said fowl was a roast. “If an Englishman cannot in the privacy of his own garden buy and shag a roast chicken, why are we even bothering to get out of bed?” Alan asks. No answer is provided to this burning question as the SB moves on to some further iteration of legal bizarrerie.
Of course there are the near-obligatory swipes at barristerial exceptionalism and pomposity. The SB duly extracts comedic value out of this material. They write of a pupil barrister being hauled before his chambers’ disciplinary committee when word gets out that he “offered a senior QC ‘a brew’, such crass northern informality having occasioned gross embarrassment to the poor delicate silk”.
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Then there is a destabilising change of gear. In the final section of the book the SB’s tone shifts to the apocalyptic as they describe contemporary life in legal practice. There is a discomforting passage where the SB describes their mental state: overworked and overwhelmed, their nightmares are infiltrated by the awful things they encounter professionally. The people we now meet are no longer drawn from the Pickwickian stable. Instead the SB collates a gallery of the deranged, the disturbed and the psychopathic.
The legal world we end on is a sort of Mad Max landscape of systemic collapse and personal calamity presided over by figures transported from Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Whether or not the SB’s description is accurate (some criminal barristers I have spoken to present a rather different account), the finale is discombobulating and at odds with the overall tone of the book.
Nothing but the Truth is for the most part entertaining and instructive. But it also traverses, albeit from a different perspective, much of the same ground as the SB’s first book and for that reason has less urgency than their earlier offerings. In the homage it pays to the authenticity zeitgeist, ithas similarities to Adam Kay’s screen-adapted medical memoir, This Is Going to Hurt. We can only hope that when it is (inevitably) turned into a Netflix show, its protagonist — assuming, of course, the SB is a he — will be played by Ben Whishaw. Thomas Grant QC’s book The Mandela Brief: Sydney Kentridge and the Trials of Apartheid will be published in July.
