The Prison Book Club

by Ann Walmsley

  His view aligned with Phoebe’s. Two specific passages stood out for her about the importance of Western books for the author. She directed them to page 94, where Hirsi Ali talks about romance novels saving her from submission. But it was clear the men had already flagged those passages in their own books. Bookman asked Phoebe to read from higher up on page 94 where Hirsi Ali says that reading romances made her feel wild and free, and aroused her sexual desire. And when Phoebe then pointed them all to page 118, Doc was already on that page and suggested the line at which she should start reading. It was exactly the section that Phoebe had been hunting for, where the author describes being fascinated with the ethical choices that characters faced in Western novels. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for instance, Hirsi Ali discovered that good and evil could reside in one human being.

  “Or page 69,” said Bookman. There was a rustle again as everybody found the page. He read the passage about how even trashy books introduced her to new ideas of freedom and equality for people of different races and genders. The men talked about how the books allowed Hirsi Ali to experiment with freedom and moral choices in a way that wasn’t possible in her real life, by standing in the shoes of characters who were free to make life decisions.

  I thought about all the books that Hirsi Ali had read at the Muslim Girls’ Secondary School in Nairobi: Wuthering Heights, Huckleberry Finn, 1984, and works by Jane Austen and Daphne du Maurier.

  “They plant the seeds of rebellion,” said Graham.

  I considered how lucky Hirsi Ali was that her family was living in Kenya at that point in her education, because her mother was able to enrol her in a school where she had access to good books and she had the opportunity to learn English. And Tom must have been thinking the same thing because he asked why the other girls in Hirsi Ali’s school didn’t react as she did.

  “We all read a book,” said Graham. “But we get different stuff out of it.”

  I cannot begin to tell you how so many of the men’s statements that evening thrilled me. They brought the book to life for me in ways that I hadn’t begun to discover on my own. And while Graham often intervened to invite some of the quieter men to speak, Raymond had not “hogged” the meeting. Indeed Graham had often agreed with Raymond’s points. The new member, it seemed, was going to work out.

  After the meeting, Graham told me that some of the men had been asking to read a wider range of genres, particularly science fiction.

  “I’m not crazy about science fiction,” Frank said.

  “Neither am I,” said Graham. “But if that’s what everyone else wants to read, I’ll read it too,” he said, with an equanimity that proved his leadership yet again.

  They both preferred non-fiction to fiction, and sci-fi seemed to them fiction to a factor of five. “I think non-fiction is stranger than fiction,” said Frank. He liked the way non-fiction wasn’t neatly tied up like a work of fiction. For example, now that he’d read Infidel and Hirsi Ali’s other memoir, Nomad, he was ready for more. “I’m interested in what happens to this woman,” he said. “I’d like to keep track of her in the future.”

  He turned to me. “How do you pick the books for your Toronto book club?”

  “We usually select books around a theme,” I said. “So one year all our books were by Indian authors, and before I joined the book group the women spent a year reading African authors. This year we’re reading a smattering, including three books in tandem with the Collins Bay Book Club.”

  I asked Graham and Frank what they’d been reading outside the book club. Frank had finished Power Concedes Nothing by Connie Rice, Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake, and was now starting The Elegance of the Hedgehog, the bestselling novel by Muriel Barbery. Graham was reading two books at the same time: Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City and Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi. He read one in the morning while doing cardio on the exercise bike, and the other at night. So many literary works.

  I walked back to reception with Phoebe, the portable alarm banging against my thigh. I decided I wouldn’t wear one again.

  That evening I sat down with Frank’s journal. It was full of admiration for Hirsi Ali. He described her as remarkable for her achievements and for risking her life to shine a light on what Muslim girls experience. He went on to describe how he was eager to get home sooner than his “stat date” in May. He had a parole hearing in a few days and he’d managed to persuade his parole officer that an old police report that had been dogging him should be put aside.

  I took off my reading glasses and put his journal on the table beside me. How many different types of prisoners there were in the world. Prisoners in cells, prisoners of religion and prisoners of those threatening violence. Even prisoners of fear, as I once had been. With each book club I was gradually liberating myself.

  Something else occurred to me that night. I was discovering my “opinion compass,” much as Hirsi Ali described discovering her moral compass. Although I had always had a strong sense of moral direction, I had never been a highly opinionated person—usually more interested in exploring the facts on either side of an argument than in landing on one side or the other. I think partly I owed this tendency to the non-opinionated, apolitical discussions around our family dinner table when I was growing up. For a judge, my father seemed completely non-judgmental. And my training as a newsmagazine journalist taught me to deliver just facts, not an editorial point of view. But as I saw the men express their views, listen to each other and sometimes alter their positions as a result, I began to find my own views sharpening into opinions. And I liked it.

  16

  THE WOUNDED

  THAT YEAR THE TURNER Classic Movies television channel showed several vintage films on prison pets. I watched Birdman of Alcatraz for the first time and Caged, a 1950s Oscar-nominated film set in a women’s prison where a kitten becomes a pet. It made me wonder if the men at Beaver Creek or Collins Bay were allowed to keep any animals. I knew that feral cats roamed the prison grounds at both Bath, a minimum-security prison twenty kilometres west of Collins Bay, and at Warkworth, another medium-security prison in the province. And some U.S. jails had introduced programs in which inmates trained rescue animals to make them more adoptable, while gaining skills for their own re-entry to society. But when I asked Ben about it as we were waiting for the February 2012 book club to start, he said the only animals that entered Collins Bay were birds. I wasn’t surprised, given that the prison, like Amherst Island, was on an avian flyway. On one occasion, he saw an owl fly in and perch on the bleachers in the yard. From his description, “big and brown with a white stomach” and a pale face, I guessed it was probably a short-eared owl. “He looked scary to me,” said Ben. “Are they prey or predators?”

  “Predators,” I said, describing how they hunt talons-first and holding up my hands to illustrate. I told him I was planning to go owl watching with Carol on Amherst Island after book club.

  In the weeks leading up to that February meeting, Peter wrote at length in his journal, documenting his reactions to the books that he was reading, and observing that literature had “elevated something inside” him. In one observation, he noted that Edgar Allan Poe effectively establishes his characters first “to make his tales more believable and subsequently more disturbing.” Writing in pencil in a neat script with a backward slant, Peter also captured other aspects of his life in prison. For the past year, he had been learning a style of street fighting from an inmate who was a professional in mixed martial arts. That, he said, explained his “bruised shins and black eyes.” He had enrolled in and dropped out of a restorative justice program, saying that it was a good program but that he was past having the ability to forgive. In one stunning passage he talked about an emotional numbness. “I know my past sadnesses and remember why, but cannot recall how it felt,” he wrote. “I can describe its weight, its overwhelming nature, the mind-tricking effort required to subdue tears, but cannot for the life of me, feel it.” I recalled
that he had been homeless for a while in high school. He also dedicated some space in his journal to describing the lack of variety in the weekly meal plan in the cafeteria: baked chicken thigh for dinner every Tuesday, cooked the same way every time; on Sundays, a piece of cake (with no icing) for dessert. He experimented with saving the cream centres of Oreo-type cookies and using them on Sunday nights as icing for the cake.

  As the February book club meeting drew near, Gaston’s journals indicated that he was not inclined to finish that’s month book, which would be a first for him. Some of it was circumstantial. He was preparing for a parole hearing seeking a transfer to a halfway house. And six days before book club, his wife arrived at the prison for a weekend Private Family Visit. But most of all, he was finding it troubling to read a novel about alcoholism and domestic abuse.

  We were discussing The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, the fifth novel by Booker Prize–winning Irish author Roddy Doyle. Thanks to Carol’s initiative, Roddy Doyle himself had agreed to answer all of the men’s questions by email. And once again the women in the Toronto book club to which Carol and I belonged were reading in tandem with the men and exchanging comments. When Carol and I gathered with the men in late February, I was revved up for a great discussion. Tristan was there too, filling in for Derek, who was away.

  When Carol had handed out Doyle’s book to the men a month earlier, she described it as another example of a male author putting himself in a woman’s shoes, like Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes. In this book, the shoes are those of Paula Spencer, a woman in Ireland who marries a local tough named Charlo. Charlo subjects her to physical and verbal abuse, and her own alcoholism clouds the picture. There is a riveting scene in which Paula could blurt out the real reason for her bruises to a nurse at the hospital, but doesn’t, because Charlo is on the other side of the curtain, hearing all. Carol told the men it was a rollicking read about “a poor Irishwoman who’s just got everything going against her. But she’s a heroic character and I think you’ll find her inspirational.”

  I think I’d first read it in England, with one of my two book clubs there. While I understood why Gaston found some of the material later in the book difficult, I admired the early chapters, where Doyle beautifully captures the chemical rush of a teenage girl’s crush and the confusion of a young woman in love. At the last Collins Bay Book Club meeting Carol had asked the men to read aloud from that scene to kick-start their reading, and it was strange to hear Paula’s words, so familiar to me, in the mouths of the men. It was Gaston who had started off, reading aloud the bit from chapter 2 where Paula describes the collapsing feeling in her legs and her lungs when she first sees Charlo. Colin took over from Gaston, reading the passage about the fabulous plumes of smoke from Charlo’s cigarette and how they danced to “My Eyes Adored You.” Gaston and Colin were both too young to get the nostalgia kick from the description of Charlo’s 1960s stovepipe pants and loafers. But I got it, being essentially a contemporary of Paula’s.

  When we discussed the novel in our Toronto ladies’ book club a month earlier, some of the women had strong opinions on whether I should have recommended it for the men. Lillian-Rose asked bluntly who screened these books. If an inmate had engaged in domestic abuse, she said, wouldn’t the book provoke, disturb or even excite them? Ruth said that since Carol and I were not psychologists or therapists, how would we handle it if the material brought out something in a book club member that he hadn’t faced before. But Carol and I explained that the men had managed well with other books about abuse and neglect, like The Glass Castle. In fact, every prison book club that had read The Glass Castle had absolutely loved it, Carol said. “Many of them have been through anger management programs and a lot of them have more self-knowledge than just about 95 percent of people I know,” said Carol. “I think it’s a way to unpack what is really evil and have a frank talk about it.”

  The discussion of Doyle’s novel was the longest and most thoughtful of any Collins Bay Book Club discussion I had participated in to that point. We began by analyzing Charlo. Shockingly, the guys didn’t see him as all that bad. Gaston pointed out that Charlo was a good father and not abusive toward his kids. Ben said he had a certain rebel appeal and only changed to become “unstable and moody” when the jobs dried up and he couldn’t find work. Dread tried to counter Ben’s point that Charlo changed. He argued that Charlo’s violence was “in his DNA,” and then he joked that Ben was confusing the fictional character with his own reminiscences. The two bickered briefly.

  “I’m talking,” said Dread, trying to make some space to be heard. “It’s this aggressiveness,” he said, referring to Ben again. “You see what I mean, Miss?” Everyone laughed.

  “Are you feeling abused again?” joked Carol, whose sense of humour usually got the conversation back on track.

  “Slightly,” said Dread, feigning hurt.

  Peter, who came in late, a little out of breath from jogging across the prison grounds, was the only one who slammed Charlo outright. “This kind of abuse is actually beyond abuse, in my opinion,” he said. “I don’t even know what you call this. But I think it’s his own sense of inadequacy that causes the abuse. He’s looking in the mirror saying, I’m not much of a man. He beats her so he can be the bigger man, but the more he beats her, the worse he feels and it just gets into that cycle. And I think that’s highlighted in the end, when he sees how strong and independent his daughter is.” What a strong, clear insight, I thought. Where had that come from?

  “That’s very helpful,” said Carol. “Because I think that we would all agree that there’s some lack of self-esteem here in both these characters.” How about Paula, Carol wanted to know. What about her background?

  Colin offered his précis. He said that while her family was really tight-knit, they lived in a relative state of poverty and she suffered from lack of privacy.

  Carol probed further: “And what do we know about her parents?”

  Peter said that we didn’t know a lot but some things were being insinuated. “Tough love” was how Ben described it.

  But Dread speculated that it was worse than that: the insinuation was incest. “The author never really explored it,” said Dread. “He just gave you a hint of it, then left it alone.” Dread had given the book a close read, I could see, as had Albert, who remembered the incest scene clearly with Paula and her siblings sitting on the father’s knee and playing a game.

  “Yeah,” said Carol. We recalled how Paula’s father had beaten her older sister, Carmel, with a belt. I remembered how Paula misfiled that in her brain as okay because fathers were different then: cruel to be kind.

  “I think right from the start, Paula had a rotten deal,” said Peter. “I don’t think she was just a victim of Charlo. She was a victim of life. She was born into what she was born into and she didn’t have a lot of options available, even before Charlo. She was basically told she was stupid, right off the hob, and then she realizes that she was poor.”

  That whole question of victimhood was perhaps the most thought-provoking question of the day. Carol advocated that Paula was admirable because she didn’t see herself as a victim. She eventually fought back. But Dread disagreed forcefully, saying that if she didn’t see herself as a victim, why was she longing for hospital staff to ask her where the bruises really came from. It went to the heart of the question: do you need to see yourself as a victim in order to accurately sort out right and wrong and accuse your abuser? It was a hard one, because in the second half of the book, Paula’s ruminations are so muddied by alcohol and perhaps head injuries, her memory so incoherent, the reader has difficulty knowing if she’s a reliable narrator. I recalled how in our women’s book group, Deborah said that Paula’s scattered, out-of-sequence memories accurately portrayed the non-chronological way that abused women with “traumatic memory” speak, and that Doyle had captured the way these women present clinically.

  Carol looked over at Tristan, who hadn’t said anything yet, and asked: “Wer
e you going to say something, Tristan?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’d like you to come into the conversation at some point,” she said. It was only his second meeting as a volunteer and he seemed a bit tentative. Nevertheless, he responded to Carol’s prompt, suggesting that Paula had some responsibility for her situation, but that it would be hard for her to squeal on Charlo.

  Peter then drew our attention to the scene where Paula tries to sort out in her own mind why the abuse was happening. “It started with dinner,” he said. “Charlo came home, saying dinner wasn’t made. She said, well you weren’t there last night, so he said, well put on some tea and she told him to make his own fucking tea. And that’s when he drove her and that’s where it goes to the scene where she wakes up and he’s over top of her and he says, you fell.” Then he described how Paula’s thoughts returned again and again to that night, asking herself whether the abuse might never have started if only she had just done what she was told and made Charlo his tea.

  “However, was she for some of you a heroine?” Carol asked. “Was she an admirable person?” Certainly Paula is heroic when she finally throws Charlo out of the house.

  Dread offered that Paula was perhaps heroic because she didn’t pass the abuse along to her kids. She took care of her family, even through her own alcoholism. But since the beginning of the meeting he had been wanting to talk about Doyle’s writing style and so he took advantage of the fact that he had the floor to redirect the conversation. “I kind of disliked the style at first because it’s all over the place,” Dread said. Carol asked him what he thought the author was trying to show with that mixed-up storyline, and the answer came to him: he said that it was Doyle’s way of mimicking the mind of an abused and alcoholic character.

  It seemed like a good moment to share the comments about the book from the women in our Toronto book club. I handed the sheet of comments to Carol. She read the comment from Deborah, who, as it happened, had worked as a therapist with abused women and with abusers. Deborah was pondering why women stay in abusive relationships. “So often they have childhood histories of abuse or emotional neglect and stay in abusive relationships, particularly if they have children, because they cannot imagine how to disengage and become independent,” she said. From that Toronto discussion, Deborah had left some unforgettable images in my head of the abused women she’d helped—women “with no teeth, with half of their faces bashed in, with one eye blinded, with hair pulled out that won’t grow back and too poor to buy wigs.” They were not images of women who had power.