The modern metaphysician of our culture is often represented as a detective, a lawyer, even a pathologist. They are all on the side of the law in the pursuit of justice, but dead set against its monolithic, routine aspects. What is celebrated in all these genres is the constant recurrence of intelligence and passion in the legalistic realms of orthodoxy and repetition. Rumpole is the human principle enshrined amongst what this book calls the 'outdated wig-wearing shysters'. Like Chandler's Marlowe, like Sherlock Holmes or Jack Frost, he pursues the riddle in the murk, at the expense of social decorum and even the exactitudes of legality itself. All the best detectives (the term here is elastic enough to include our lawyer) push their luck in regard to the rules. They redeem justice by being cavalier about its mechanical application, for they all know, without exactly spelling it out, that the law applied without imagination is pharisaism. The Orson Welles figure in Touch of Evil takes this quest to a grotesque conclusion: he simply fits his suspects up, but he's never wrong about their guilt, all the same.
They're all of them great psychologists, and this ties in well with our modern obsession with character and motivation: Freud is after all the gumshoe of the Unconscious and its crimes, walking down the mean streets of repression, his diagnostic revolver permanently cocked. The great popularity of the tale of crime and its discovery is surely down to the fact that it provides the opportunity to open up the human heart and peer inside. This, after all, is Rumpole's real job. Aided by the deus ex machina of coincidence and his own Falstaffian understanding of devious and greedy humanity, he soon susses the true dispositions of those paraded before him. His working method is really no different from that of the CurZ d'Ars: he stares into the souls of those he meets and trusts what he sees. If he sees evil, smallness of spirit, a rancour in excess of the facts, that person is guilty; if he sees generosity of spirit, however cabined and confined by circumstance, that person is innocent, or at least not as guilty as had previously been supposed. The examination, or the cross-examination, merely serve to confirm the original intuition. Life seldom outwits him.
He does it six times here, most passionately in a case involving sex and religion. Mortimer, predictably, is pretty soft on the first indulgence and rather severe about the second. But he defends - which is the other essential part of Rumpole - the right of people to be wrong, hateful, even completely off their heads, as long as they don't actually damage others in the process. Rumpole, like his creator, gives liberalism a good name.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.