The Prison Book Club (14 page)

Living in Hampstead meant being reminded of some of my favourite authors at almost every turning in the road, with Blue Plaques marking the buildings in which they once lived. It had long been a literary and artistic community within London. Keats, whose poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” my husband had once recited to me at the beginning of our relationship in university, had lived at the bottom of East Heath Road on what is now Keats Grove. Daphne du Maurier, whom I read avidly in my teens, had resided at Cannon Hall, the former courthouse at the end of our lane. A childhood favourite of mine, Eleanor Farjeon, whose
The Little Bookroom
is a collection of literary fairy tales that I read to this day, had spent many years not far away, at 20 Perrin's Walk. I still have that book, though the dust jacket with its charming illustration by Edward Ardizzone is long gone.The novelist David Cornwell (John le Carré) had a house nearby and signed my husband's entire collection of le Carré spy novels. I thought I had landed in a writer's paradise.

As I pulled into the driveway of our Toronto house, my thoughts of Hampstead fell away. I was home.

The morning after the Guernsey book club meeting, I hurried over to the library. I found that there were no copies of the
Selected Essays of Elia
described in the novel and only two circulating copies of Lamb's
Essays of Elia
in the entire Toronto Public Library system, which indicated just how obscure it was. A nearby branch had one of them: a nice 2009 trade paperback edition by Hesperus Classics with a foreword that described how it was originally published in 1823. I discovered that Lamb was a noted British critic and essayist in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries and a popularizer of classic works of literature. He had spent time in Hampstead with Keats. And like some of the Romantic poets in his circle, his subject matter was often a nostalgia for old England. According to the foreword,
Essays of Elia
became a popular staple in British households for the next hundred years.

I opened the cover, eager to indulge my own nostalgia for London, hoping he might have something to say about Hampstead, and eager to continue to revisit my own memories of happy times there with friends among the English and expat communities. I was taken immediately by Lamb's opening essay describing South Sea House, which still stands near the corner of Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate, and his word portraits of miserly bachelor clerks who worked there for the South Sea Company. Lamb himself was a former employee of the company, which was notorious for the eighteenth-century stock speculation and collapse known as the South Sea Bubble. His writing was authoritative and playful, making me laugh at his description of a South Sea clerk with “frizzed-out” hair who was “melancholy as a gib cat over his counter all the forenoon.” I could conjure the image.

It had been years since I'd read literature of that vintage, with verbal flourishes and antiquated references that I didn't understand. Like Gaston, who had decided he was “overthinking”
Gulliver's Travels
, I just let
Essays of Elia
flow over me. Without Gaston, I would never have discovered Lamb.

8

FRANK AND GRAHAM'S BOOK CLUB

B
ARELY A WEEK after Carol opened Graham's letter during the ferry ride to Amherst Island, she and I met with Graham and Frank to discuss the launch of their very own book club. I knew that Beaver Creek Institution would look different from Collins Bay because inmates called it “camp” and described it as the most comfortable minimum-security facility in Ontario. But I was unprepared for how different. Located two hours north of Toronto, in a summer-cottage area of dark lakes and pine forests, Beaver Creek was just a cluster of buildings on a country campus without a perimeter wall or barbed wire. Instead of occupying cells, the men lived in two-storey bunkhouses with their own cooking facilities. The inmates could just walk away, and some did, though the consequences were a return to a higher-security prison. Families could bring in food when they visited. And some inmate work details involved off-site work, including harvesting cranberries in a nearby bog. Even the name Beaver Creek suggested a family campground, not a correctional facility. Carol later regretted that we hadn't brought a picnic for the men and a gift of olive oil for Frank.

We were ushered into the prison's administrative boardroom and within a few minutes, Graham and Frank appeared in the doorway smiling broadly. I had a sense they were going to hug us, which I knew was against regulations. Sure enough, they wrapped their arms around us. My first hugs from inmates. Accepting an embrace from Graham's six-feet-four frame was awkward for me at five feet five. My head sort of ended up on his chest. “I've been looking so forward to seeing you guys,” he said. They were both so excited that they talked over each other. Carol told Graham that he looked tanned and slimmer than he had at Collins Bay. “Frankie takes most of my food, right,” he teased. “And I trained really hard. Frankie has me on a rigid schedule.”

We only had an hour to hammer out a plan for the book club before Count. Already the pair had recruited nine other interested guys, many of whom were quite sophisticated readers, they told us. The prison warden himself had been wonderfully supportive of the idea. But there was a problem. Donna, their liaison person in the administration, was so keen on the book club that she wanted to join it and had independently been pitching it to some of the inmates. “What I don't want to do is scare away some guys who are gonna say that it's the warden's pet project,” Graham said.

At that point we invited Donna to join the meeting. With Carol backing them up, Graham and Frank politely explained to Donna that, for the idea to work, it had to be seen as an inmate-run book club, that only Graham and Frank should undertake recruitment, and that, while Donna was welcome to join the book club, she might have to withdraw if the members grew uncomfortable. Donna was surprisingly amenable to their recommendations and offered them the boardroom in the programs building for their monthly meetings. That was a bonus, because meeting in the chapel was always a harder sell among inmates who were averse to religion. Then Graham turned to Carol and said that instead of her plan to have Frank and him choose the books that day, he'd rather convene a meeting of the members and let them decide. Like Donna, Carol conceded, which surprised me even more. Everyone saw the value of what Frank and Graham were trying to accomplish.

But the pair had to choose the club's first book that day, because the inaugural book club meeting was just six weeks away. “For the first book,” suggested Graham, “something medium-sized and catchy that these guys will all relate to.” Carol had just pitched them on nearly a dozen books from my selection committee's lists.

“How about
The Cellist of Sarajevo
?” she asked. It was a novel that Frank had read with the Collins Bay Book Club before Graham joined.

“That was a good book,” said Frank. “I wouldn't mind repeating it.” Graham agreed.

We said goodbye in a flurry of good wishes and they were gone in a sudden repeat of the hugs. When the men were out of sight, Donna pointed out that hugging wasn't okay between volunteers and inmates. We told her we were aware, and that it wouldn't happen again. They just seemed so overjoyed to see us.

Six weeks later, it was introductions time at the inaugural meeting of Graham and Frank's Beaver Creek Book Club, with Carol and me in attendance. We were sitting in plush boardroom chairs around a long table in the building that housed the prison library and programs classrooms—much cushier than the circle of metal chairs at Collins Bay. I sensed immediately that this was a different crowd from the book club at Collins Bay: fewer visible tattoos, more white-collar criminals and, ironically, more lifers. While I'd heard from Carol that one of the members had killed his parents and siblings when he was a teenager, I had no idea which fellow it was, or whether the men would reveal their crimes as they went around the table.

“I've always wanted to join a book club but never ran with that kind of crowd,” said a dark-haired man in his early thirties whose name tag read DALLAS. Snorts of laughter followed from around the room.

“Well, you're runnin' with a book club crowd now,” said a gravel-edged voice from across the table—a middle-aged guy named Earl.

One man admitted he'd quit school at age twelve and said his favourite book was
Don Quixote
, which he'd read at age seventeen.

An inmate with a T-shirt that read
Rock 'n Roll
identified himself as Bookman, the prison librarian. The prison librarian was an
inmate
? Bookman said he couldn't sleep when he first came to jail and reading had helped him doze off. He declared his number one book to be “from the nineteenth century, by Victor Hugo,
Les Misérables
.”

As the remaining eight men introduced themselves, I took particular note of Doc, a ginger-haired man with freckled skin and wire-rimmed glasses, who looked like he had just popped in from his country club in his V-neck pullover, and Tom, a reader of fantasy and sci-fi, who had shoulder-length hair and unusually long nails. Tom copped to making money in high school by “writing original stories for people in creative writing classes.” I figured he'd done something worse than that to land in a federal prison.

Graham and Frank knew everyone already, but they introduced themselves all the same. I wanted to see what they would say to other inmates about themselves. Frank told the others he had been in and out of jail since 1965. I noticed for the first time how much balder he seemed than a few months ago. “I got through by doing a lot of reading,” he said. “But if you have no one to share it with, it fades.” So true.

“Frankie is the reason I originally came to the book club at Collins Bay,” said Graham, easily the biggest guy in the room, with the most booming voice. “I fought and argued with him that I wasn't going because they were holding the meetings in the chapel and I thought they were trying to convert me. But Frankie joked that that didn't happen until at least the second meeting.”

When it was my turn, I explained that I couldn't miss seeing Graham and Frank start their own book club at Beaver Creek and asked the members if they would let me sit in for a few months. No one objected. Perhaps that was because Graham and Frank had sat me between them in a proprietorial way. If anyone had said no to me, they would have had to answer to Graham.

It seemed to me that the greatest risk to Graham and Frank's book club was the presence of prison staff at the meeting. Unlike at Collins Bay, where Carol's book club volunteers came from outside the prison, the volunteer facilitators at Beaver Creek were two off-duty Beaver Creek employees. Phoebe, the lead facilitator, was considered cool and not part of the penal mainstream because she was the popular young English teacher. But her co-facilitator worked in the department that administered the prison's correctional programs: a serious-minded and sensitive woman named Meg. Typically the presence of someone from the corrections team makes inmates clam up because staffers usually file reports on inmate behaviour. Also at the table was Donna, the prison official who was instrumental in helping Frank and Graham start the group, but who was a stickler for rules, as I knew from my meeting with her the previous month. Wiry and dark-haired, Donna seemed tense and hyper-alert, a human radar for lies and wrongdoing. Whenever her eyes settled on me, I felt she was reading my conscience, causing me to wonder if I had done something wrong. Donna and Graham had had a frank conversation prior to the meeting and they agreed that if any of the book club members objected to her presence, she would bow out. As it turned out none of the men balked. They seemed prepared to give the “volunteers” a chance.

Given the many solid readers in attendance, Carol abbreviated her usual speech about how the book club worked. There was no briefing about civil discourse or polite listening, no warnings about showing up to future meetings without the book. “Half of the enjoyment is this private thing that you do: reading,” she said in a warm confessional tone. “The other half is coming together and discussing it. It enriches your whole understanding. Books become your friends.

“You're not going to like all of the books,” she told them. Confronting this truth up front is critical for any book group, even my women's book clubs. “But I've been in book clubs for years and years and I try really hard to get to the end of books I don't like because I'm part of the discussion and I'm part of something that happens communally. And very often when I get to the end I say, ‘You know, that book had a lot to tell me.'” Then she offered the carrot: “If you are a good attendee there's a certificate that goes in your file.” Several of the men smiled.

Every inmate at the table had his copy of that month's book: Steven Galloway's novel
The Cellist of Sarajevo
. Set in the 1992– 1996 siege of the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the novel draws on the true story of Sarajevo cellist Vedran Smailovic´, whose response to a brutal mortar shelling that killed twenty-two citizens lining up for bread was to risk his life playing Albinoni's moving lament, Adagio in G Minor, every day for twenty-two days in the city's ruins, one day in honour of each of the victims. In life and in the novel, the musician was a symbol of hope, humanity and courage. Galloway's story imagines a protagonist who is a female counter-sniper, code-named Arrow, hired to protect the cellist from Bosnian Serb snipers. The other two main characters are civilians struggling to survive in the besieged city: Kenan, head of a young family, and Dragan, a middle-aged baker. The action veers between claustrophobic scenes of citizens inching through the city as they dodge snipers' bullets, and detailed passages of sniper tradecraft as Arrow sets her trap. The themes for discussion are rich: identity, courage and morality, and the power of the arts to bridge hostility and hatred. It was, as one reviewer described it, “catnip” for book clubs. For those reasons, it was the book Carol often chose for a new prison book club's first meeting.