Review of Alphabet published in The Sunday Telegraph; 8/8/2004; by DAVID ROBSON

Alphabet by Kathy, Page Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
 
Section: Review; Books/Fiction

KATHY PAGE 's literary CV includes a short stint as writer-in-residence at a British prison. I do not know if the inmates benefited from her tutelage, but she has certainly put her experiences to superb use in this admirable prison novel. Alphabet is not just highly readable, but one of the strongest, most eloquent, most tightly constructed novels of 2004.

It is set in the twilight years of the Thatcher government and features Simon, a bright but illiterate young man who is jailed for the murder of his girlfriend. Why did he kill her? At his trial, at the prompting of his counsel, he claimed that he was motivated by sexual jealousy, infuriated by the fact that his girlfriend was seeing another man. The reality was more banal, more frightening. He killed her in a fit of rage because she would not wear her glasses when he asked her to.
What hope for the man if he is prey to such brutal, irrational anger? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Alphabet is about his slow - at times, painfully slow - rehabilitation. After learning to read and write, Simon embarks on a series of tentative relationships with the opposite sex. He has letters smuggled out of prison to a woman called Vivienne, who knows nothing of his circumstances and thinks he is an art lover. He takes another pen pal called Tamsin, who turns out to be an emotionally needy 14-year-old. Then one of the prison officers takes his fancy . . .

His efforts to make female friends are as poignant as they are clumsy. They culminate, bizarrely, in a friendship with a fellow prisoner, Victor, a pre-op transsexual. On release, Victor has his sex change and comes back to visit Simon as Charlotte, wearing a black top and a fuchsia skirt. Prison inmates, if one takes the story at face value, cannot be choosy.

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 fashioned a fable about redemptive love. She has no illusions about prison as a place of rehabilitation. All the bleakness of prison life is here in heaping measure, from casual acts of sodomy to mind-numbing bureaucracy. But she has celebrated, with rare deftness, the resilience of the human heart.