When jet sets into a Firm formula

Like thousands of passengers before me, and like the woman in front of me and a man to my left, last week I read John Grisham's The Firm on the plane back from America. As we disembarked at Heathrow we three smilingly acknowledged one other, guiltily recognising our complicity in some unfathomed conspiracy to make this 38-year-old former Mississippi lawyer the most read author, if not on earth, then certainly in the jet streams above …

…it breathlessly. It takes Sydney Pollack's recent film adaptation to turn The Firm into a morality tale about the wealthy and the dispossessed, freewill and freedom. Pollack even redeems it as a legal drama by having its end turn on a clash between legal ethics and civic responsibility: Mitch refuses to compromise his clients' confidentiality and instead shops his firm for overcharging, a practice simply thrown into the novel by Grisham as a venal detail.