'The One-Eyed Judge' takes reader (and reviewer) on unforgettable ride

By Michael A. Fredrickson
BridgeTower Media Newswires
 
BOSTON, MA -- In summing up his damning opinion of a little-known 15th century epic poem, the critic C.S. Lewis declared that the only unforgiveable literary offense is to be dull. Well, I’m here to tell you that Lewis had it wrong. What’s really unforgiveable is to write a novel so engrossing that the reader overshoots his stop on the Red Line by two full stations and then has to get off and backtrack to find his way home.

That’s what happened to me when reading Judge Michael Ponsor’s new novel, “The One-Eyed Judge.” Maybe I was especially susceptible to the book because I had enjoyed his first novel. Or maybe I was easy pickings because he and I both hail from Minnesota, studied at Oxford, went to law school, and now write novels about lawyers.  (I should add here that I don’t think we have ever met.)

Whatever. The point is that this is a gripping novel with a propulsive thrust. The characters live and breathe, the plot tugs you along willy-nilly, and the writing is crisp and compelling — like his first book, “The Hanging Judge.” So when I was asked to review “One-Eyed Judge,” I accepted the task with enthusiasm.

I didn’t reckon on the subject matter. The beating heart of this novel is a federal criminal trial against a college professor charged with knowingly receiving and possessing child pornography.

I can think of nothing sadder and more harrowing than the business of raping children for fun and profit — unless it is probing the psyche of those who buy the stuff. So I started to read, figuring I would just wade through it out of a sense of duty, expecting ... well, I don’t know what I expected. I just had this nameless dread about where the book might take me.

Fortunately, Judge Ponsor handles his potentially corrosive material deftly and honestly. He accomplishes this primarily by peopling his tale with credible participants who are fully engaged.

We start with a somewhat befuddled defendant, an aging academic with an interest in Lewis Carroll, and whose perception of his own role in the receipt of the contraband is itself ambiguous and may not even be fully knowable.

He’s defended by a fire-breathing defense lawyer intent on doing the best for her client, even as she skates right up to the edge of the impermissible in pressing him to take a plea she believes may be the only way to save him from a draconian sentence under the federal guidelines.

Similarly, the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case struggles to do his job — and the right thing — in the face of mounting pressure from higher-ups in the U.S. Attorney’s Office and “Main Justice,” who have tendentious agendas of their own.

Meanwhile, as the stakes and tempers rise in the courtroom, the judge must pick his way through his fledgling and occasionally prickly relationship with Claire Lindemann, the college professor he was smitten with in the first novel and a colleague of the defendant.

As if these added pressures are not stressful enough, a crisis in the judge’s brother’s family foists upon him the temporary responsibility to care for the brother’s children. The problems he confronts as their temporary guardian brings point and perspective to his attempts to do the right thing on the bench.

All this Judge Ponsor accomplishes with tact and aplomb, and the reader will be thankful for the breathtaking ride.

In his first novel, there was a gratuitous bit of violence at the end — hence the one-eyed judge. He resorts again to a violent incident at the close of this one. I’m not convinced that either instance enhances his work. Perhaps the author feels compelled by the expectations of the genre to add them.

But this is a petty quibble (or just one reader’s crotchet) that detracts little from the author’s solid accomplishment. Story and genre aside, Judge Ponsor pulls us into the seeping miasma that permeates his tale.

He might also succeed in forcing his reader to consider anew how little we know about the innocent wonder (if that’s all that it was) in the work of Charles Dobson (aka Lewis Carroll).
Maybe it’s just me, but after all we have learned about sexual child abuse in the last 40 years, it’s hard to look at Carroll’s sexualized photograph of “Alice,” set out as the frontispiece of the book, without wondering about Alice. Was it really a wonderland, or something more sinister?

Fortunately, there’s nothing sinister about “The One-Eyed Judge.” Read it. You’ll like it.

Michael A. Fredrickson recently retired after serving as general counsel to the Board of Bar Overseers for 28 years. He has published three novels about lawyers: “A Cinderella Affidavit,” “Witness for the Dead” and “A Defense for the Dead.”