For six months a retired teacher in Maryland tells everyone she meets that her son-in-law is in a Paris hospital recovering from a bad batch of bouillabaisse. She repeats it to neighbours, to her daughter’s bridesmaids, to a book group, to people who were at the wedding and want to know when he will be well enough to take a call. The story is not hers. It was written for her by federal officers who explained, reasonably, that the alternative might get the young man killed. By the time it falls apart she has lost most of her friendships to it. The French Illusion by John Grisham is nominally about a kidnapping in Normandy. It is really about what it costs ordinary people to be conscripted into somebody else’s secret.
The Fifth Day of the Honeymoon
The French Illusion by John Grisham opens with a setup of brutal efficiency. An American couple, married nine days, hire a car from their Left Bank hotel to see the D-Day beaches. Their driver is quietly drugged over a goat cheese salad in Bayeux. A man in a chauffeur’s cap and a disposable mask collects them from the restaurant, engages the child locks, and releases an odourless gas into the back seat. Everything the kidnappers needed was posted online by the bride herself, hour by hour, with photographs.
Two families are contacted the same night. Two ransoms of two million dollars each are demanded, wired, and received. The bride is walked to a church in a small town north of Paris and handed back to her father. The groom is not. Nobody involved understands why, and the answer takes another two hundred pages and a great deal of institutional throat-clearing to arrive.
The Ledger Underneath The French Illusion by John Grisham
What lifts this above the standard abduction novel is the arithmetic. One set of parents is an orthopaedic surgeon and his wife, and they can liquidate two million by lunchtime. The other set cannot. Watching them get there is the most convincing thing in the book: an off-market cash sale of the house they bought in 1988 and raised three children in, brokered by a discreet consultant with a flat fee and no questions, closed inside forty-eight hours at three hundred thousand under value, with a ninety-day leaseback so they can pay rent on their own address while they pack. Retirement accounts torn open. A brother’s hundred thousand. A quiet loan from the wealthier family, documented on a promissory note because they will not take charity.
They make the deadline. It changes nothing.
Few writers in this bracket understand a household balance sheet as precisely as Grisham does, and here the balance sheet carries the argument. When the motive for these kidnappings eventually surfaces, it runs back to a decade of detention without charge, of men bought for bounties and held for years and released onto foreign streets with no money and no apology. The novel does not argue the case so much as present the invoice. Anyone wanting the documented version of what it dramatises will find it in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose fifth article is one sentence long, and in the counterterrorism reporting that has tracked how thoroughly it was set aside.
Three Things That Weaken It
Three complaints about The French Illusion by John Grisham, all of them structural rather than fatal, and all of them arriving in the second half.
- The agencies take the book over. Once the intelligence services assume control, the families recede to phone calls, and the novel loses the domestic pressure that made its first third so good.
- The captor is underwritten. His grievance is real, specific and well made, but he is given perhaps fifteen pages of interior life to justify everything the ending asks of him.
- One device is too pleased with itself. A piece of tracking hardware, hidden somewhere unlikely, gets far more admiring attention than its eventual usefulness earns.
Against that, the captivity chapters are exceptional. They are short, plain, entirely without self-pity, and organised around absurdly small victories: a prisoner teaching a teenage guard the English days of the week, purely to work out what month it is. And there is not one courtroom in the entire novel. Nearly everyone in it has a law degree, and the degree is worth nothing to any of them, which is a deliberate and rather bleak joke from a writer who built a career on the opposite proposition.
Where The French Illusion by John Grisham Leaves You
Readers should know that the torture is detailed and repeated. Waterboarding, flogging, starvation, sleep deprivation by noise and searchlight, electrical shock, and months in a wire cage the size of a coffin. It is not gratuitous, and it is not brief.
The ending will divide people. There is no confrontation, no reckoning, no scene in which anyone answers for anything. What there is instead is a settlement, a swallowed humiliation at the top of a government, and a man on a terrace above the Aegean who has decided he is finished and can probably afford to be. Whether that reads as an evasion or as the whole point depends on how you feel about the argument the book has been making since page one.
Three meanings hang off that title. The mildest is the tourist board’s France, a backdrop with pastry and cathedrals and no colonial history attached, bought annually by millions of visitors who never think to check. The cruellest is the fiction the two families are ordered to perform for half a year, which strips them of nearly every friendship they had. The third is conjuring, in the professional sense, and it drives the closing section; it is also the one the jacket copy will sell. The publisher has picked the least interesting of the three.
If You Finish This and Want More
Anyone who finishes The French Illusion by John Grisham tends to want either more of this author or more of this argument. The natural next step is The Widow, the previous Grisham and the closest recent match for how coldly he handles money and bereavement in the same paragraph. For the non-fiction underneath all this, Framed, written with Jim McCloskey, collects ten cases of people the system was completely certain about and completely wrong about. Readers who preferred the second half, with its ordinary citizen swallowed by an intelligence apparatus, should try The Oligarch’s Daughter by Joseph Finder, and anyone who simply wants to see how far this author’s range now stretches can go to Camino Ghosts, which is a far kinder book.
Further afield, Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary is the first-person account this novel is standing beside, and Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans covers adjacent ground on what suspicion does to a family over years rather than weeks.