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Alphabet (McArthur & Co $14.95)
While packing for a move from London, England, Kathy Page discovered a novel she had abandoned almost ten years earlier and decided to resurrect it. "Time had performed its magic-a kind of alchemy-and it was suddenly easy to see what to jettison and what to keep,"; she says.
Happily ensconced in her new, solar-panelled writing space on Salt Spring Island, complete with a view, Page proceeded to finish her grim novel, Alphabet (McArthur & Co. $14.95), about a fictional felon, Simon Austen, who is serving a life sentence in Britain for murdering his girl friend.
"When a character like this arrives,"; Page says, "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.";
A young, illiterate carpet layer, Simon Austen likes to command his girlfriend to do things, then he watches. In spite of her entreaties, they have not yet had sex. He strangles her when she takes off her clothes but refuses to put on her glasses.
As Austen later comes to realize in therapy, he liked to turn her on and off like she was a television screen and he had the remote. Brutal, manipulative, damaged, intelligent and occasionally charming, Austen was abandoned by his mother and abused as a child in foster care.
A widower with time on his hands volunteers to teach Simon how to read in prison. "He's got all the time in the world and it isn't like school at all... He gets into education, big time. Eighteen months later he's functional and hooked on the alphabet.";
Austen forges tentative relationships with women; first writing to the alcoholic academic, Vivienne, under a false and carefully crafted artistic identity. When his deception is discovered, he tries a second time with Tasmin. This time he tells her who he is really is and she doesn't mind. Even better, she gives him the gift he most needs for his new obsession-a typewriter.
Trouble is, Tasmin has lied to him. She is way underage and he is way in trouble.
Along comes Bernadette, the new prison shrink. She calls him courageous. The increasingly devoted Austen has that word courageous painfully tattooed on his chest to join the numerous other words that wrap around his body. It's the first word that's positive in a world that has branded him otherwise: waste of space, a threat to women, stupid, callous , bastard and murderer.
Bernadette gets Simon Austen admittance to a gentler prison facility with a therapeutic focus, but the love stricken killer at first doesn't want to go. At the new facility he begins to make some headway in self-recognition but eventually his aggressive behaviour with a superior does him in. After a year in the new prison, he's spirited away in the middle of the night. Imprisoned for ten years, he must readjust to a seamier and a more dangerous environment.
This convincing portrait of a felon clinging to the life raft of the alphabet arose from Page's experiences as a writer-in-residence at a men's prison, three days per week, for about a year, where her job mostly consisted of encouraging the inmates to write and supporting other creative projects.
"The prison was both fascinating and dreadful,"; she says. "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.";
Having also undergone lengthy training as a counselor and psychotherapist, Page-also a qualified carpenter and joiner, with an M.A. in Creative Writing-found she was well-positioned to revisit her abandoned manuscript in the relative tranquility of the Gulf Islands. Her seventh novel since 1986, and Page's first as a new Canadian, Alphabet was nominated for the 2005 Governor General's Award for Fiction. 0-75381-861-2
by Cherie Thiessen
[BCBW 2006]
Happily ensconced in her new, solar-panelled writing space on Salt Spring Island, complete with a view, Page proceeded to finish her grim novel, Alphabet (McArthur & Co. $14.95), about a fictional felon, Simon Austen, who is serving a life sentence in Britain for murdering his girl friend.
"When a character like this arrives,"; Page says, "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.";
A young, illiterate carpet layer, Simon Austen likes to command his girlfriend to do things, then he watches. In spite of her entreaties, they have not yet had sex. He strangles her when she takes off her clothes but refuses to put on her glasses.
As Austen later comes to realize in therapy, he liked to turn her on and off like she was a television screen and he had the remote. Brutal, manipulative, damaged, intelligent and occasionally charming, Austen was abandoned by his mother and abused as a child in foster care.
A widower with time on his hands volunteers to teach Simon how to read in prison. "He's got all the time in the world and it isn't like school at all... He gets into education, big time. Eighteen months later he's functional and hooked on the alphabet.";
Austen forges tentative relationships with women; first writing to the alcoholic academic, Vivienne, under a false and carefully crafted artistic identity. When his deception is discovered, he tries a second time with Tasmin. This time he tells her who he is really is and she doesn't mind. Even better, she gives him the gift he most needs for his new obsession-a typewriter.
Trouble is, Tasmin has lied to him. She is way underage and he is way in trouble.
Along comes Bernadette, the new prison shrink. She calls him courageous. The increasingly devoted Austen has that word courageous painfully tattooed on his chest to join the numerous other words that wrap around his body. It's the first word that's positive in a world that has branded him otherwise: waste of space, a threat to women, stupid, callous , bastard and murderer.
Bernadette gets Simon Austen admittance to a gentler prison facility with a therapeutic focus, but the love stricken killer at first doesn't want to go. At the new facility he begins to make some headway in self-recognition but eventually his aggressive behaviour with a superior does him in. After a year in the new prison, he's spirited away in the middle of the night. Imprisoned for ten years, he must readjust to a seamier and a more dangerous environment.
This convincing portrait of a felon clinging to the life raft of the alphabet arose from Page's experiences as a writer-in-residence at a men's prison, three days per week, for about a year, where her job mostly consisted of encouraging the inmates to write and supporting other creative projects.
"The prison was both fascinating and dreadful,"; she says. "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.";
Having also undergone lengthy training as a counselor and psychotherapist, Page-also a qualified carpenter and joiner, with an M.A. in Creative Writing-found she was well-positioned to revisit her abandoned manuscript in the relative tranquility of the Gulf Islands. Her seventh novel since 1986, and Page's first as a new Canadian, Alphabet was nominated for the 2005 Governor General's Award for Fiction. 0-75381-861-2
by Cherie Thiessen
[BCBW 2006]
Submitted on June 30, 2004 in By David.
