HIS HONOUR: Mr Jardim, withdraw that comment immediately.
MR JARDIM: Your Honour, I'm not withdrawing it because it's got nothing to do with the merits of this case, just as your small-minded treatment of my client has got nothing to do with the merits of the case. I mean, could you have cocked this thing up any worse? Bloody helpless kid and you know she's back out on the street now. You're known throughout the state as a heartless old prick and a drunk, and seeing I've gone this far, your daughter-in-law's appointment to the court is widely viewed as a grubby political payoff. Today's pretty much the lowest I've seen you stoopbut it's been a rich field of excrem—
HIS HONOUR: Senior, will you have Mr Jardim removed?
Charlie Jardim has just trashed his legal career in a spectacular courtroom meltdown, and his fiancée has finally left him. So when a charitable colleague slings him a prosecution brief that will take him to the remote coastal town of Dauphin, Charlie reluctantly agrees that the sea air might be good for him.
The case is a murder. The victim was involved in the illegal abalone trade and the even more illegal drug trade. and the witnesses aren't talking.
And as Dauphin closes ranks around him, Charlie is about to find his interest in the law powerfully reignited.
a brilliant debut novel
Quota is the first novel by Australian lawyer, editor and features writer, Jock Serong. After a courtroom episode (avidly described in legal circles as Jardim’s “brain snap”) that earns him two nights in the police cells, threatens his career as a barrister and contributes to the end of his engagement to dedicated junior lawyer, Anna Murdoch, Charlie Jardim is feeling tired, apathetic and indifferent to the whole business. But he finds that his old friend, senior barrister Harlan Weir is determined to thwart his exile and sends him to Dauphin, a small town on the Victorian south coast to check out the witness to a murder. Charlie wonders if this brief will change everything and “make the….whole shitty game fall away from the foreground like cardboard theatre sets, revealing something that would expunge the futile ritual of his weeks”. Or will it be his last hurrah? Patrick Lanegan’s statement about his brother’s murder doesn’t quite ring true. Charlie and Harlan are in no doubt that defendants Skip and Mick murdered Matthew Lanegan, given the illegal abalone trade and the drug trade in which they were all involved, but a conviction seems unlikely unless Patrick is more forthcoming. As he weaves a tale that will surprise the reader with some completely unexpected turns, Serong creates interesting and complex characters and treats the reader to some wonderfully evocative descriptive prose, to wit: “…Barry had traded in auto parts and hoarded information, the factual rubbish others would discard to keep their house-proud minds prim like a brick veneer. His was more of a two-bedroom hardiplank surrounded by rusty wreckage…” and “It took a few moments to find Patrick, reduced in the middle distance to a pair of pulsing black fins leaving stabs of silver bubbles, chattering consonants among the blue-green vowels of the reef” also “Here, now, the weather altered the very appearance of the world, by turns stripping and bleaching, shading and saturating the town’s colours. The wind, idle at the moment, was nonetheless integral to the shape of the trees, the mood of the sea. His static surrounds had hidden this reality from him: the world was in a state of incessant upheaval” and “The drivers headlight was gone, leaving a gory smashed eye socket.” Serong’s depiction of a small Victorian town, with his description of the pub and its patrons, the Chinese café, the football game and the local characters, is perfect. Likewise, his courtroom scenes feel authentic, no doubt a product of his personal experience. Against the backdrop of a murder trial, Serong explores family loyalties, truth and justice, and the legal system: “Only through fanatical belief in the system could you devote such care to the construction of an argument but never fall for the hubris of it.” This work of literary crime fiction is a brilliant debut novel and readers will look forward to more from Jock Serong.
Marianne, 13/10/2014
