Criminal connection
Auberon Waugh
Billy Rags Ted Lewis (Michael Joseph £2.00) Stories of escape from prison touch a chord in anyone who has been to a boarding school or served in the armed forces. Moreover, the closed society of a prison seems an ideal setting for novels. The surprising thing has always been that so few prison novels ever appear. Mr Lewis may provide the answer. These are no clean-limbed British officers bouncing up and down on a wooden horse. They are not even 'political ' prisoners, whose burglaries or whatever are the result of some innate rejection of the capitalist system. They are ordinary, run-of-the-mill criminal psychopaths and the sad truth that they are extremely stupid, extremely unpleasant people.
One can always write a searing social document about them of course, and there are undoubtedly a few people who enjoy reading such things. But from the novelist's point of view — and it is the novelist's job more than any other to supply his readers with enjoyment, in whatever form their en joYment takes — it must be as hard to earn a living from penology as it would be for a restaurateur who decided to cater only for coprophagists.
Again, it is possible to write jokes about prison life and pretend it is all jolly good fun: with terrific characters with hearts of gold beating underneath. The nearest Mr Lewis gets to suggesting that there may be a heart of gold somewhere is in his hero's maudling devotion to his disgusting child, called Timmy. The closer the novelist gets to the truth, and the better he evokes the atmosphere of violent, slightly unhinged men cooped up together, the more depressing and distasteful the book becomes.
Obviously, it is to Mr Lewis's credit as an artist that his book is extremely depressing and distasteful. He does not gloat over the unpleasant details, like Hubert Selby. Scenes of sodomy and violence are described as they happen, neither more nor less. People can say that it is escapist and socially irresponsible not to wish to be informed on what life is like in the top security wing of our prisons, but if one allows for the fact that novel-reading is a recreational activity, it seems to me much odder to wish to spend one's leisure hours contemplating such things. But nothing must be allowed to detract from the fact that however unenjoyable we may find Mr Lewis's book, however dismal his preoccupations, he has written it extremely well. Its only faults — and antipathy to the hero in an escape-thriller must be judged a major fault — are inherent in the subject he has chosen. There is a certain nobility in Mr Lewis's refusal to make his hero any less repulsive than he obviously would be in real life, In part, the book is no more than the case history of a hopeless case — Billy Cracken, whom we join in the maximum security wing of Aston, Birmingham, with twenty-two years and seven months of his sentence still to run. Flashbacks tell us about his prior sexual experience, the prostitution and suicide of his beloved sister, Linda, etc etc but I do not think these are important. The obvious fact is that Billy is a psychopath of the sort one can identify very easily in most classrooms in the country, or among one's fellow passengers whenE ver one travels by public transport or indeed anywhere outside the little world of friends and family which one constructs around oneself in order to avoid such people. The book raises the obvious question of what society's organisers should do about the psychopaths in our midst, but offers no very coherent suggestion.
Anthony Burgess argues convincingly in A Clockwork Orange that any attempt to cure psychopathy by surgery or drugs or mental conditioning is a crime against human dignity and liberty, a sin against the Holy Ghost to the extent that the subject was free to choose evil and chose it. He may well be right. Others urge execution, castration, prolonged exposure to Margaret Drabble-style compassion and a host of other gruesome remedies but. as I say, I do not think these are matters with which sane private citizens need concern themselves. There is a whole army of people whose emotional inadequacies drive them to organise their fellow citizens' lives. It is conventional to regard their disturbance as less obnoxious than that of the psychopath who knocks an old lady on the head, but I see no reason why ordinary people should worry themselves on behalf of either party, even by way of passing an idle afternoon. Let us examine Billy Rags as a thriller.
The first thrill is when Billy organises a demonstration among his fellow murderers and psychopaths against a proposed change in dress regulations. The reader's sympathies are not extravagantly engaged in the issue. and perhaps it should really be seen as part of the social documentary, revealing how prison staff are terrified of long-term prisoners who have very little to lose if they knock off the occasional prison guard. Obviously nobody but a saint or a sadist would want to be a prison guard anyway. Next Billy plans to escape, and we are so depressed by life in prison by now that we wish him well. His plans are nearly spioiled by a Kray-style mobster whom he betrays and who pursues him, once out of prison, with gangsters and bent policemen. However, after various thrills and spills, Billy does escape — there is a vivid picture of what the ordinary world must look like to an unaccommodated man on the run — and rejoins his almost characterless wife, Sheila, in hiding with his repulsive son, whom he adores. No doubt his affection for Timmy is meant to show the gentle or human side of his character, but in Mr Lewis's hands it is so obsessive as to be another aspect of his psychopathy, along with his vicious persecution of a child murderer in prison.
Once free, our Billy only wants to leave the country and lead a law-abiding life with Sheila and Timmy, but is prevented from doing either of these things by circumstances of his position. So far as the book can be said to have a moral, or to invite our indignation at some social injustice, it is to highlight the shortage of opportunities for escaped prisoners. Perhaps it will inspire some saintly person like Lord Longford, when he has exhausted his present enthusiasms, to form an Escaped Prisoners' Aid Society.
Eventually, Billy is forced to resume criminal activity with the result which could be foreseen on page one. As I have said, a depressing book, and one which fails as a thriller through our lack of sympathy with its hero-victim; but it is well written and most instructive and should persuade a few careless householders to Invest in a shotgun and a savage dog.
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