What will she be like? he thinks. I don’t know.
Who will I become? Ditto. A leap in the dark…

“…a wonderful book, peculiar, intense, revealing, challenging, exhausting and above all riveting…I kept saying to myself, how could she know this?” Guardian (UK) columnist Erwin James (author of A Life Inside)

Simon Austen is serving a life sentence for murder. Intelligent but illiterate, charming but also damaged and manipulative, he admits to what he’s done but his motives are far from clear, even to himself.

Then Simon learns to read and write. From his high security prison he begins an illicit correspondence with a series of women. The more he learns – about them and about himself – the higher the stakes become. Simon finds himself on a perilous and unpredictable journey as he stumbles towards self-knowledge and redemption.

“Alphabet is not just highly readable, but one of the strongest, most eloquent, most tightly constructed novels of  the year…It is a measure of the quiet artistry of Alphabet that, out of material that would have been at home in the blackest of black comedies, Kathy Page has celebrated, with rare deftness, the resilience of the human heart.” Sunday Telegraph

“Sometimes novelists go too far – and sometimes they manage to demonstrate that too far is the place they needed to go.” Time Out

Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, UK, in July 2004 UK; released October 2004 in Canada by McArthur & Company. Finalist for a Governor General’s Award in 2005.  First published in the USA by Biblioasis, 2014.

“A moving novel about knowledge, self-awareness and the power of words, set in the purgatory of prison. This young man’s life demands our attention and refuses to let go.” Kirkus starred review

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kathy-page/alphabet-page/

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Kirkus feature on Kathy Page and the writing of Alphabet

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/kathy-page/

”A complex book, and splendidly written, Alphabet is an intensely compelling reading experience that speaks to the power of words and the significance of language in all its dangerous subtleties.” Marc Horton, The Edmonton Journal

“Kathy Page knows that the things we can’t understand are often the things that terrify us the most. In her dark and lovely seventh novel, she takes us places we may not want to go…” Cherie Thiessen, January Magazine Nov 15 2005

“Simon is real. Simon gets under your skin. You’ll keep reading Alphabet because you’ll want to understand how Simon got to Z from A.” Pam Burkette, Times Colonist, Nov 13 2005

“It’s not hard to guess what got Page onto the GG shortlist: sheer chutzpah. ” Joel Yanofsky, the Weekend Post, Nov 12 2005

“Alphabet is a stunning tour de force. I have rarely encountered a novel so compelling, so disturbing, so ultimately satisfying as this new work by Kathy Page.” WordWorks.

“Alphabet is not just highly readable, but one of the strongest, most eloquent, most tightly constructed novels of the year….  Out of material that would have been at home in the blackest of black comedies she has fashioned a fable about redemptive love.  She has celebrated, with rare deftness, the resilience of the human heart. “ Sunday Telegraph, UK.

“One of the most complex characters I’ve ever met in a novel. His attempt to win redemption is totally engrossing.” Victoria Times Colonist.

“Sometimes novelists go too far – and sometimes they manage to demonstrate that too far is the place they needed to go….” Time Out, UK.

“Page brilliantly captures the brutality of prison life.” Scotland on Sunday.

“Late in this sharp and splendid novel, Kathy Page has her incarcerated protagonist think: “It’s a story you could tell… if you had someone to tell it to.” And that – an inability to communicate, to find an outlet –  is what Page seems to be telling us keeps Simon from rehabilitating himself…. The story is told almost entirely form Simon’s point of view; it is terse, rhythmic and, dare I say it, almost effortlessly masculine. Her greatest achievement is Simon himself. He knows there is no justification for his crime and even as he comes to understand the reasons for his offence, he knows he is guilty. Page looks at him firmly, objectively, compassionately.” Sunday Telegraph, UK.

“It is only because Page is such an accomplished writer that I forced myself to care, and hurried to return to the book when I’d been forced to put it down… Page throws mixed up hope into a world where only fantasies and delusions dare to grow… when I got to the end of Alphabet, I found myself longing for more.” Globe and Mail, Canada.

“Intensely compelling.” Edmonton Journal.

“Alphabet is a hopeful story, even though its subject, Simon Austen is a disturbed, inarticulate, illiterate murderer who is spending his life in a British Prison…. Simon has no miraculous breakthroughs; he doesn’t even get out of jail. But the baby steps he takes towards understanding himself give both him and the reader hope. Page’s writing is tight…her depiction of prison life is believable and enthralling.” GEIST, Canada.

“The strength of Alphabet is that it examines the complexity of providing answers.”  Times Literary Supplement, UK.

“Her understanding of the prisoner’s frustration, loneliness and anxiety is exceptionally portrayed… a profound insight into the workings of the prison system as well as the minds of the prisoners… a truly gripping novel.” Sunday Business Post, Ireland.
“I found this a truly compelling read, right to the last page. Whatever you think of Simon and his crime the issues of prison, punishment and redemption make this book an excellent book group choice.” New Books Magazine, UK.

You could say that I have spent  the  three years it took to complete  Alphabet  co-habiting with a dangerous  man. Someone brutal and manipulative,  but also damaged,  intelligent, and, occasionally, charming. My family were  forced to be close to this man  as well. It was something of a roller coaster ride  and from time to time, all of us felt we had had more than enough of him. The fact is, though, that when a character like this arrives, you can’t  throw him out. Just as in a real relationship, you have to keep going until whatever you came together for is  complete. It’s only afterwards that you can look back and  put it into perspective.

In this case I have to go back about ten years.  I was offered of a writer’s residency in a category B men’s prison at a time that meant I had to chose between  it  and a coveted place  on the scriptwriting course at the National  School of Film and Television.  Most of my friends were horrified when the idea of prison finally won out, but I felt that I couldn’t turn down the  chance to see and engage with part of the world I  (hopefully) wouldn’t encounter otherwise.  I went to gaol, spending about three days a week there for the next year – encouraging  the inmates to write, and supporting other creative projects, such as a play and a literary festival behind bars.

The prison had a huge effect on me. It was both fascinating and dreadful. It was a place of  frighteningly intense feelings, and, at the same time, given there was no outlet for them,  one of  utter stultification. It was about as hard a reality as you could get, yet nowhere else could fantasies  and delusions grow so thick and fast.

I  was  eventually given a set of keys and allowed to  roam the prison quite freely.  I talked to inmates in their cells, in solitary, as they worked mending TV sets or sewing  tee shirts, or outside in the yard with its geometrically patterned flowerbeds. I went to the office and read inmates’ files.  The experience was emotionally exhausting but at the same time  imaginatively very stimulating. What  was it like to work here, year in year out? What was it like be a man who had committed  murder and who must serve out his time in a place like this? What kind of relationships are possible for him?   Which was the ’real’ man, the one in the record,  the  neglected little boy he wrote about in class,  or the once charming the socks off me over a cup of tea and raising  hundreds of pounds for charity?  How much can a person change? Why do some women seem so drawn to romantic attachments with prisoners? And, to take a more abstract  approach, what exactly do we mean by justice? How should we deal with people who have hurt us? There are of course  no simple answers to any of these questions. If nothing else, I learned that.

After the residency,  I returned gladly  to my ordinary life.  I  began to write about the prison, but at least half of me wanted to get away from the place,  and in retrospect I can see that the material was too raw. It was simply beyond me at the time to find the shape for it  and do it justice –  or, you could say, I wasn’t ready to or capable of living with a man like the one I had begun to invent. Other, easier  projects came up.  It was almost ten years later, when packing up my office to move house that I came across the  few chapters I’d written and the boxes of notes, cuttings and mementoes from my time ‘inside’.
I  sat on the floor and read it  all through. Time had  performed its magic –  a kind of alchemy – and it was suddenly easy to see what to jettison and what I had  to keep: the  main character, Simon Austen, serving life.

Photos courtesy of Prison Reform Trust, UK
Copyright © 2004 Kathy Page
Commercial uses: Contact literary agent, Lesley Shaw of
Gillon Aitken Associates, London, UK (insert email address recep@gillonaitken.co.uk)
Reproduction for educational purposes, etc: www.accesscopyright.ca

Alphabet
Kathy Page

Weidenfeld & Nicolson
LONDON

1.

There’s no chair, even. The room is blue-grey, fluorescent-lit, like the rest.
‘Property ?’ the man at the counter asks. Well, they’ve already taken his proper clothes: Simon’s standing there in a striped shirt, a pair of thin jeans that won’t stay up. ‘Anything that might get nicked or trashed,’ the man says, ‘Give it here – ’ he’s done this a thousand times, has the timing just so – ‘We’ll seal it up nice and tight… then we’ll lose it for you good and proper… Ha ! Seriously, there’s no liability…’ Oh, he’s proud of himself, all right. His white shirt glows almost violet. The breast pocket is stretched over a pack of twenty fags. The top of his bald head shines in the light. He taps the side of his nose, leans forwards:
‘What you got then,’ he says ‘Mummy’s ashes ? The bleedin’ crown jewels? Spit it out, we don’t have all day/’ There are six more behind me, Simon thinks, there’s fuck knows what ahead.. In the end, it can’t matter  much what happens to these two particular items of his. Except that this way he doesn’t have to look after them and if the are lost, whatever this bald bastard says, it won’t be his fault… Plus, the sooner he gets through this the sooner he might get to lie down. He could sleep on a bed of knives in an earthquake, so long as he was lying down… So, he grins back at the big-headed, fat-fingered man with  a sense of his own sense of humour; he keeps his thoughts to himself and puts his goods on the counter. First, the envelope.
‘It’s sealed,’ he says. Well, says the slow look he gets back, opening your sodding correspondence is the last thing on earth I’d do, because, like you, it’ll be a piece of –
Simon’s too beat up to react. His eyes are so sticky he can hear every blink, feel it too. He had the shower after the strip search, but it was cold and he can still smell his own sweat.  He stares at the counter top, dirty oak edging with Formica inset, remembers how the envelope was given him by a washed-out dyke type woman who watched him tear it open, unfold the single sheet inside, then read it to him, all two lines of it: ‘I am sorry. This is the way things had to be. I hope things turn out well for you, Sharon.’ That’s what the woman said it says.  Then she said he needed counselling, gave him a list of phone numbers as long as an arm; he was so fucked off with her that he nearly binned the thing, but in the end he smoothed it out and resealed the envelope, kept it for years in the lining of his pilot jacket. Well, as a matter of fact, things turned out just about as badly as they possibly could, and this lot can lose the fucking thing if they want to, he thinks. He’s moving on. In.
‘One watch,’ fatfingers observes.
‘It’s a Rolex,’ Simon tells him. But it’s not. He got it with his first month’s proper pay, from someone he met in a pub. It looses. He was ripped off. So, good riddance. He’ll travel light: washing things, plate, mug, bowl.
‘That it?’
He does his squiggle with the pen. The joker opposite turns around to lock up, then pushes over an empty envelope: brown with black type, official looking.
‘Your Free Letter,’ he says.
‘What for?’ Simon asks .
‘Well, son, you can wipe your arse with it if you want!’
‘Right, mate. Maybe I will,’ Simon spits back. His hands are fisted and he’s woken right up now.
‘Keep you head down’ the man says, pleased, turning away. Simon shoves the envelope in his pocket, collects two sheets and a blanket, stuffs them in the pillowcase, moves on.

The man in front of him has a moustache, the one behind a full chin’s worth of hair. He can hear the creak of both of their pairs of shoes, the rattle of their key chains, their breath, his own. They pass through the next pair of doors, solid, then barred and the next, and the next, pausing each time to wait for the key to slip in and do its work, two openings, two closures.  He thinks how he could die here. Be killed. Start using drugs and do the job himself. Just get old… and all of a sudden, how badly he wants what he’s not had, all of it, even not knowing what it is! How much he wants to throw the switch, de-materialise, re-appear somewhere else. His heart is already fighting to escape from his chest when the last set of doors opens on to the wing and the stench and echo of captivity smashes into him. It’s like the opening of a furnace door. A wall of heat. They have to push him through.
‘Go on,’ says the bearded man behind, ‘go on now, son, this here is a one way street.’

Photo courtesy of Prison Reform Trust, UK

Love Inside

Extracted from an article about Kathy Page’s experience as Writer in Residence in Nottingham Prison, published in The Big Issue, 19 July 2004

A neatly dressed, balding man with some alarming facial scars leaned back in his chair and treated me to a list of  already familiar complaints about the state of the prison  showers and so on. Suddenly he brightened, changed tack and told me: ‘But of course,  there’s one  good thing. My marriage is far, far better since I came in here.’  We both laughed; he went on to  explain  how, inside, he had become more thoughtful  about his wife and their relationship. He had plenty of spare time and could give her the kind of attention she had always wanted. They wrote every day; he had begun to know her in ways which he never had before. ‘The honesty can be heavy. She has to have her say. But it’s like a kind of honeymoon,’ he aid, cutting the conversation midstream to take up his turn at the computer.

I soon realised that a man being in prison is of course far more likely to have a negative effect on  romantic and family relationships:  economic hardship, lack of contact, the stress of travelling to visits and  the  jealous imaginings of the inmate can be  a fatal combination.  Nonetheless, over the coming weeks I met others who felt  their  relationships with their partners  had been improved by incarceration, and I became aware of the many ways in which men inside actively sought out  and found new attachments while serving their time.

In any workplace there are attractions  between people; men in prison have  few other flesh and blood options. The barriers between prison staff and inmates, in theory strongly demarcated,  may, for some, be a catalyst to romance.  I was both shocked and touched when  one of the inmates I worked with sought me out to explain that he had a ‘crush’ on me, knew it wasn’t reciprocated  and would only be a wind-up, and so would be dropping out of the writing workshop.

Because it is such a harsh reality, prison is a place where fantasy flourishes. Any woman  coming into a men’s  prison is  liable to  become, as another man  informed me with a frankness I could perhaps have done without,  ‘wanking material’.  Likewise, a female member of staff may well find herself  teaching  a class  full of semi-clothed men who spend hours a day working out and who, despite their dangerousness are,  in many ways, under her control.  All the same, it seems that a surprising number of  ‘real’ relationships  do develop inside. While meetings between men and women in  a men’s  prison often take place in a  grim, highly  regimented context that is the very opposite of romantic, they can, because of the context, be surprisingly emotionally intimate. There is  frequently  a  degree of vulnerability on the part of the man that would be unusual outside. Relationships spring up between inmates and female  lawyers, teachers, probation, officers, visitors  and even governor grades. And, I discovered in my year at Nottingham, many inmates seek out  official or unofficial pen friends who may later become visitors, partners or wives. Many men put an extraordinary amount of time  into their correspondence.

Some of these prison  relationships are no doubt duplicitous, exploitative, or plain bizarre (for example, those women who seem only attracted to violent offenders behind bars), but  some  were  genuine. As Angela Devlin shows in her study, Cell Mates, Soul Mates,  many prison marriages last and survive the transition to  the outside. I found myself thinking a great deal  about these relationships. What would it  be like to be  a man  negotiating, for the very  first time, an encounter with a woman that was not entirely on his terms? What would it  be like, as a woman, to have to cope with  the reality of a lover’s terrible past and all the questions it posed?

I could easily see the advantage of a relationship  for the man inside. What was  in it for the woman?  As with every question I asked myself in that year  at Nottingham,  there were no simple answers.  Some  women are  compulsive rescuers. On the other hand, roles  in prison relationships often seemed to me to be to some extent reversed, with the woman appearing to have more control  and more rights than she might outside. Another  thing to consider – and  this was interesting to me personally, since I was involved in a long-distance relationship at the time – was  that the writing of  letters and the restrictions on meetings created by the regime impose on the would-be  lovers  an old-fashioned courtship very different to the fast pace of modern relationships. This makes for a particular kind of verbal intimacy and at the same time allows fantasies about the other person to remain unchallenged by everyday reality.

Occasionally  I would hear talk from prison professionals as to how a prisoner’s relationship was causing concern. I could see the logic and there is no doubt that some prison relationships are dangerous. Anyone being hurt or abused by their partner needs, in my view, to  get out. But increasingly, during that year and afterwards as I wrote Alphabet, I became interested in the grey areas, in the  flawed relationships that were also, somehow, good. I came to realise that even downright destructive  partnerships contain shreds of contact with another, and are potentially catalysts for transformation.  Our sense of self  arises out of out intimate relationships, and one of the most irreducible aspects of our humanity is that we do, as  Ethel Spector Person writes in Dreams of Love  “desire to live an imaginary life in the minds of others.”
Copyright © 2004 Kathy Page
Commercial uses: Contact literary agent, Lesley Shaw of
Gillon Aitken Associates, London, UK (insert active link for Lesley’s email address recep@gillonaitken.co.uk)
Reproduction for educational purposes, etc: www.accesscopyright.ca