The Prison Book Club (29 page)

Parvat came up to me afterward. He was keen to tell me about the book he was reading to learn about how to better communicate with women. “It's called
The Five Love Languages
,” he said. When I looked it up later, I saw that the author's prescribed five ways to express love are gifts, quality time, physical touch, acts of service and words of affirmation. These were certainly good ways of forestalling an abusive relationship. But it also struck me that, except for physical touch, these were the graces that Carol was bestowing on the men. No wonder they respected her.

That evening, after a rough ferry crossing over choppy water, Carol and I went owl watching on Amherst Island. Snowy owls arrive on the island most winters in search of voles and I'd never seen one of these majestic birds, with their enormous white mass and exotic yellow eyes. We drove to the south shore of the island, past a flock of black-and-white bufflehead ducks bobbing in the shallows, where the lake was free of ice, and past a flock of snow buntings. And there, atop a telephone pole perched a bird that looked like an elongated marshmallow, with eyes the colour of Meyer lemon rind and a rounded head. It was a snowy. He tolerated us for a moment and then drew his wings up sharply, pushing off from the pole with feathered feet so massive they resembled paws. With slow-motion balletic strokes of his wings he pulsed the air and tilted into the woods. We took separate cars back to Carol's, and I travelled alone along a side road at sundown where some short-eared owls swooped in spurts over a field, their pale, disc-like faces seemingly sewn on to their bodies. It seemed to me that Amherst Island was a wildlife sanctuary first, and a settlement of humans second. And predators were more visible than prey that day.

I cooked chicken for our dinner that evening, to which Carol had added a salad. I pointed out to her that she still had an ash mark on her forehead leftover from the Ash Wednesday mass she had attended earlier that day. She rubbed it away. That evening she told me that charitable donations were starting to come in as people honoured the pledges they'd made at the fundraiser. It came as a huge relief. She would be able to buy the books for the coming year.

The next morning I set off early from Carol's for the prison to visit Ben. The sun seemed to rise with unusual speed that day, as though it were a school play where the stage crew had mishandled the hoist.

It was Ben's last month in the book club. We would miss him terribly. He had noted down a few pages from
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors
, about how Charlo brainwashed Paula. He read to me from the part where Paula remembers Charlo telling her that she wasn't fit to look after the children because of her alcoholism and stupidity. “He broke her down,” said Ben, looking up at me.

Then he read from another section in which Paula imagines running away, trying to wrest back control over her life. He was struck by Doyle's description of how in Paula's nighttime dreams she could never run away, how she couldn't breathe or move. “That description, like wow. Just fighting something. You're trying to sleep. You're trying to not let it in, but you have no control over it.”

“The control issue makes me think about what it must feel like a little bit to be in here,” I said.

“That's one of the worst things,” he said. “You might be in the yard and then you're coming back in here. You know it's a thing that you just have to do. It's terrifying just to think about it. So you try not even to think about it.”

He would wrestle back some control in fifteen days, when his family would pick him up at the front gate of Collins Bay Institution and drive him to his halfway house. He had requested day parole in a Toronto halfway house near his aunt's place. His girlfriend lived in the Toronto area, and had just put down a deposit on a loft under construction north of the city. This time, the authorities were giving Ben a full month, not just seventy-two hours, to gather his financial records and present them to his parole officer.

I looked down at his journal again. On January 5, he made a note in his journal about reputation and that it was important. His own reputation in the prison, he told me, was as someone who's quiet, who gets along with others and attracts others. I pointed out that he never reacted when Dread provoked him in book group. And I remembered how he didn't respond angrily when the men ganged up on him about being institutionalized when we were reading
War
. Why did he put up with that? “No, I don't succumb to nothing like that,” he replied. “I can't, while I'm in this place. I should not basically say how I feel. Like, I still hold my feelings, but act nonchalant about that.”

The chaplain called, “Count,” and Ben had to leave. He would be in touch with Carol's organization when he got out, he said. He would be taking all his book club books with him when he left.

“When you get out, do you see yourself reading on an e-reader?” I asked him. Some of the other men were interested in trying one.

“I'll think about it. But I still want that good smell of a book and turning the pages. Even building your own little private library.”

“That's great, Ben. That's great.” We shook hands and he walked toward the door.

In a women's book club on the outside, we'd probably have a festive send-off for a member who was moving away. Champagne, maybe, and certainly a card or present of a book. But at Collins Bay, men disappeared from book club abruptly, never to be seen again. Those stepping down to minimum usually told us. Others just evaporated. Some were deported and some wound up in solitary for a spell. One nearly died from a heroin overdose, we were told.

As Ben walked away from me, holding his journal, I wondered if he would be the book club member who would start a book club on the outside.

17

THE SUSPECTS

I
T WAS THE SETTING MOON that woke me on March 14, its beam shining through the slats of our bedroom window shutters just before dawn. To be woken by the moon felt as though the earth had been bumped off its axis. When I sat up, my copy of William Boyd's novel
Ordinary Thunderstorms
slid off the bed, reminding me that it was book club day at Beaver Creek. When the sun finally appeared, it marked the beginning of a record-breaking March heat wave that would bring hail and, yes, thunderstorms to Toronto and the areas just south of Beaver Creek.

Carol did not usually accompany me to the Beaver Creek Book Club, but this time she was planning to meet with prison officials to accelerate the launch of a book club at the adjacent medium-security prison, Fenbrook Institution. So she had scheduled that meeting to coincide with book club. As she sat in the passenger seat answering emails, her cellphone rang. It was an Anglican chaplain calling from Cowansville Institution, a federal prison in Quebec's Eastern Townships. He had heard about the book clubs and wanted to start one in his prison. He was telling her that it would be an English-language book group—20 percent of the inmates spoke English only. She turned to me grinning widely and explained that this was the second call in a week from people wanting to start book clubs in federal prisons outside Ontario. The first call had been a former CSC employee wanting to start one in Stony Mountain Institution, the men's medium-security prison in Manitoba where Graham had spent some time. Carol's ambitions made her hungry to expand quickly, but her board was more cautious and asked her to make sure the funding would be in place before venturing out of province.

As we drove onto the Beaver Creek grounds two hours later, Carol fished her lipstick tube out of her purse and again expertly applied the colour without looking in a mirror. It was a trick that always made me laugh.

The next two books at Beaver Creek were mystery novels about criminal suspects in Britain and India. William Boyd's
Ordinary Thunderstorms
was set in London in 2009, and Vikas Swarup's
Six Suspects
, an Agatha Christie–type mystery, was set in New Delhi in 2001. Both explored ideas of dramatic reversals of fortune and overturned stereotypes about class and criminality.

Ordinary Thunderstorms
was the latest novel by Boyd, author of the Booker Prize–nominated
An Ice-Cream War
. Technically a thriller about corruption in Big Pharma, this new novel twisted the literary formula. Adam Kindred, the protagonist, is an innocent man who stumbles upon a body and, through a series of naive decisions, finds himself on the run and homeless, sleeping rough by the Thames. After the disintegration of his marriage and the loss of his job as a cloud scientist in the U.S., Adam is in London for a job interview. He is eating lunch at a restaurant when he notices another diner has left behind a plastic business file with his business card visible. When Adam attempts to return the file to the owner's Sloane Avenue address, he finds the man with a knife in his chest begging him to remove it, which Adam does. That fateful decision makes him a prime suspect and soon, despite his innocence, he is hiding out in bushes below the Embankment at Chelsea Bridge. Evading the law drives him into ever-deepening circles of homelessness, begging and, eventually, a stunning criminal act, upending everything the reader thinks he or she knows about Adam.

Adam's decision to help the victim by removing the knife from his chest tested the book club members' patience. “Anybody who's been in prison knows don't touch the murder weapon,” said Graham. “Don't touch the murder weapon. Leave it right there, right? Hands up and back out of the room.”

“That does seem to be the litmus test for cons, doesn't it?” said Earl. “We all just back right out of the room. No way, I'm not touching that.”

Carol countered that she might very well remove the knife if asked. But then, she'd never been in prison as an inmate.

Raymond, who in prison parlance was a “commercial criminal,” and not a violent offender, instead focused on Adam's actions
after
pulling out the knife. In his view those choices simply strained credulity. “Adam went from this towering professional with great ethics and great academic history to a subterranean culture and immerses himself to the point that he can't escape it without going to the lowest common denominator of that culture,” said Raymond. There was something about the ramped-up volume of his voice, and the slow pacing of his sentences that made me think he was used to being listened to by underlings. He had, after all, been the founder of a major public company before his conviction for fraud.

Someone pointed out that there is a turning point in the novel when Adam enters the Belgravia Police Station to turn himself in and assist police, but changes his mind, thinking that the circumstantial case against him is too great. Again, Raymond protested that the guy had a plausible defence and should have just picked up the phone and called a lawyer. My mind went immediately to the name of the top criminal defence lawyer whom Raymond himself had called to handle his own case.

But many of the other book club members had had experiences that ran counter to Raymond's, quite apart from what calibre of lawyer they could have afforded. “Many of us in this room have been to neighbourhoods,” said Graham, “where, if you happen to be there, the police don't really give a shit what your explanation is.”

“You may well be able to explain your way out of it,” agreed Earl. “But not before the cuffs are on, you do the perp walk, you get the picture in the paper and everything else happens first. Maybe you get to explain it all later and you get a walk. But maybe you don't.” Tom nodded. He said he knew people who had made the same choices as Adam.

Unfazed, Raymond continued his critique, protesting that the characters were “contemptible,” the plot “predictable” and Adam's transformation “inconceivable.”

But then Graham gave Jason, a new inmate in his early twenties, the floor. Jason told the others that they were being too critical and made a case for thinking about the book as a parable. “I think Adam's transformation ties into the whole theme of the book, which is social identity and how we're all interconnected. We're not so different from each other. Anyone can go from one position to another position like that.” He snapped his fingers. Then he suggested that everyone turn to the final chapter where Adam reflects on how two lives can overlap without being observed. Jason read aloud the passage, which talks about an invisible network of almost-realized encounters between individuals. I hadn't seen it before, but now I could imagine the slender threads that connected the novel's Big Pharma executives and Shoreditch prostitutes, the police and the criminals. It struck me that crimes are Venn diagrams where the desperate and the privileged intersect.

“I think you're both right,” said Graham, telling Raymond that, yes, the events seemed implausible, but that he'd seen situations where well-off people made terrible mistakes and chose to disappear.

And yet, as Byrne pointed out, despite those overlapping lives, none of the characters in the book seemed to care about each other. “From the top CEOs to the lowest bum on the street, they didn't seem to give a heck about each other,” he said. Tom and Graham and Richard all came up with examples from the book that supported that view. And Carol suggested that it was a way for the author to show how it feels to be homeless in the world.

At that point everything changed. Doc arrived, apologizing for missing the early part of the meeting. His wife had been by for a visit. He had a totally different take on the book, saying that it reminded him of Guy Ritchie crime comedy movies like
Snatch
or
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
. “It's that British farce where you've got a whole bunch of different characters that end up being intertwined,” said Doc. Boyd was having us on by tampering with the conventions of thriller writing. And layered on that, said Doc, was the sense of resignation that overtakes those stuck in poverty in Britain.