Review of Alphabet published in Victoria Times Colonist (Canada); October 10, 2004; by Lynne Van Luven

Alphabet by Kathy, Page Weidenfeld & Nicolson.


Books show questions of crime and punishment affect us all

We read the headlines and we watch the news stories on TV.  The plot is crude and simple: one human being steps beyond the pale of accepted norms and laws to hurt, even torture or kill, another person. Usually the victims are intimate with their attackers. 
If you are like me, you shake your head in shock and horror. My responses are always sadly predictable:  How can that happen?  Who are these people?  Our easiest response is to think of them as monsters, as embodiments of evil.  We want to believe perpetrators of violence are as unlike us as possible.  And yet, they are our fathers, our uncles, our mothers, our neighbours down the street -- not so other after all.

Salt Spring writer Kathy Page likes to say she spent three years “co-habiting with a dangerous man” in order to complete her latest novel, Alphabet.
Ten years ago, Page shocked family and friends by taking a job as a writer in residence at a prison in England.  She spent a year visiting the jail (or gaol, as the British would say) three days a week to encourage the inmates to write, as well as to support the creation of a play and a literary festival behind bars.  She talked to the inmates as they weeded flower beds and sewed T-shirts.  She read inmates’ files.  She found herself wondering who the prisoners really were, how much a man could change after sentencing, and “what exactly do we mean by justice?”
“It was an extremely powerful experience,” Page says in a telephone interview.  “The men in the prison had committed terrible crimes against others.”
 “I was made to see that the same man who’d done something terrible could also be kind and thoughtful. These extremes could co-exist in the same person, and I had never felt that so forcefully before.”

Page also began to think about “the human drama of what happened afterwards to someone who had done something horrific. What was it like to have that violent history and then try to move on?  And then I wondered what do such men do about relationships, which are what most of us have to sustain us through life.”
Eventually, out of that stew of thoughts and questions and experiences, came Simon Austen, the protagonist of Alphabet, published in Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and being released in Canada this month.
Page admits she had to wait for “time to perform its magic” with the manuscript. The year after her residency was over, she struggled to write about the prison even as she craved escape from memories about it.  Frustrated, she put the work aside for almost 10 years and pursued other projects.  Only when she was packing to move to Canada did she read through the manuscript again and see how to edit and shape it.
“In retrospect,” Page writes on her website, “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.  . . . I wasn’t capable of living with a man like the one I had begun to invent.”
I’m struck when reading Alphabet that Simon is indeed the sort of man our society seems incapable of living with:  he’s intelligent but illiterate; he’s charming but manipulative; he’s brutal but yearns for tenderness.  And he is one of the most complex characters I’ve ever met in a novel.  His attempt to win redemption is totally engrossing, and I won’t spoil the suspense by saying more.

One of Simon’s obsessions is the way language has shaped his identity.  Just as he has been “inscribed” by society’s assessment of him, so he records those words in tattoos on his body:  ARROGANT, WASTE OF SPACE, MURDERER.
But Page shows us Simon’s groping toward another story of himself:  “BRIGHT, he was called when he was in Education, and he had that one done properly, on his back.”
Shortly after I finished reading Alphabet , a friend in Australia sent me another book, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, which is subtitled, A True Story of Death, Grief and The Law. The author, Helen Garner, is a novelist and a journalist who deserves to be better known in this country.  The person found guilty of violence in Joe Cinque’s Consolation is a young woman, a law student at Australian National University, who in 1997 concocted a bizarre plan to murder her devoted boyfriend via  heroin overdose.  Garner’s book explores the aftermath of the crime, particularly the grief and rage suffered by Joe’s mother Maria Cinque. 

Like Page, Garner is fuelled by her own curiosity and her own struggle to understand the sorts of things human beings do to one another and how society should deal with such transgressors.  The power of Garner’s book is its searing honesty:  she feels disgust at the crime, bewilderment at the ethics of the young people in Joe Cinque’s circle who knew of the murder plot but did nothing, and most of all, she feels huge compassion for Joe’s mother, with whom she becomes friends in the course of the trials following Joe Cinque’s death.  Maria herself is a compelling figure whose grief and  pain -- “How am I supposed to go on?” she asks the court in one enraged outburst -- . is almost unbearably vivid.
If you’re reading this as a 21^st century cynic, you might say that books don’t change anything, but I have had my understanding and compassion immeasurably deepened by  Garner’s and Page’s books.  And it’s clearer than ever to me that the condemned are not only among us, they are us.

Kathy Page will launch Alphabet on Oct. 14 at 7 p.m. at Artspring on Saltspring Island and she will read from her novel at Bolen’s Books on Oct. 23.