My future appeared to me as a landscape suddenly revealed by the cresting of a hill. It wasn't grim but it was barren and it sprawled endlessly beyond the curve of the horizon. It was a scalding moment, delusions scoured from the surface of reality. Solitude and celibacy, I thought. And, I had to admit, under the alcoholic anesthetic, it didn't feel all that bad. Even if I reframed the words -- made them, say, abandonment and isolation -- they still described a kind of freedom. I remember stumbling to bed that night in that paradoxical state of peace that comes with knowing you have nothing left to lose.Author Linden MacIntyre -- after a long and prominent career in Canadian broadcasting -- made a splash in 2009 with his novel The Bishop's Man. In that book, MacIntyre told the story of a "fixer" in the Catholic Church; a clerical representative of the Bishop for Cape Breton tasked with making recent sex abuse scandals disappear. It was a timely and thoughtful examination of a decent man with the contrary goals of protecting the institution of the Church and doing right by the victims of abuse. In a sense, Punishment is another look at conflict of conscience, but this time the institution under the microscope is the Canadian penal system and the victims are the convicts; and especially the career criminals who become scapegoats in the eyes of law enforcement and correctional officers.
As Punishment begins, Tony Breau has returned to the small community of St. Ninian, N.S., after a divorce and taking early retirement from his job at an Ontario penitentiary under unclear circumstances. (His final position at the prison was also unclear to me -- after a long career as a guard, Breau took some night classes and became a "case worker".) The first scene sees Breau happening upon a strange confluence of events: His first love Caddy, unseen or heard from for over thirty years, is being consoled by family as local miscreant Dwayne Strickland -- someone who Breau knew intimately in the Ontario prison system -- is being arraigned for the murder of Caddy's granddaughter. From here, information is revealed scattershot -- Breau is a teenager with Caddy, a guard with Strickland, he's married, he's waking up alone in a musty old farm house -- and very slowly, the ties between all the characters are revealed. Just as Breau seemed to be the only man within the prison system who truly believed in justice -- the only one who might breech the Blue Wall in the name of prisoners' rights -- he finds himself, in the face of community vigilantism, identifying more with Strickland than with those who would condemn him without clear evidence.
Punishment is one of those frustrating books where mysteries are set up (Why did Caddy break off communication? Why did Breau's marriage fall apart? Why was Breau forced to retire?) and when characters start to talk about these events, they break off in midsentence, or refuse to answer any more questions, or in the case of Breau, take down the bottle of whisky to forget. From their first meeting, it seems obvious that Caddy and Breau will get back together, but she doesn't answer the phone when he calls, or he mopes around and decides not to drop in on her for weeks at a time, or when one reaches out a hand, the other pulls away. This book is slooooooow and any mysteries are solved by the reader long before MacIntyre makes things plain.
Punishment is also frustrating in that everyone is black and white: Prison guards and police officers (portrayed as the most violent people in the system) think that criminals are scum, and even those who have served their time and have been released deserve anything that comes to them; an attack on an ex-con simply a pre-emptive strike before his next offense. Standing alone between the two sides is Tony Breau, trying to explain why "evil is more an adverb than an adjective", and unafraid to buck the system (in a totally passive I-am-but-an-unwilling-agent-who-cant-help-but-do-the-right-thing kind of a way). To ratchet up the theme, the decline in the circumstances of Breau's life began on 9/11, and he becomes the only person in his community who opposes the invasion of Iraq; believing it to be more vigilantism than justice. Familiar, right?
So, to get back to The Bishop's Man: There is, obviously, no excuse for priests sexually abusing children and those "fixers" who went around silencing witnesses and shuffling criminal priests off to unsuspecting communities were also participating in evil. However, and not to excuse their actions, one can see how they misguidedly believed that what they were doing was for the greater good; that the institution of the Catholic Church was more important than the ruination of individual lives (and I sincerely hope that I'm making it clear that nothing excuses the priests or the fixers here). In Punishment, it would seem that MacIntyre is trying to make a similar point: The institution of the penal system, the solidarity and continuing authority of those who work inside prisons, is thought to be more important than the rights of -- or even the lives of -- the prisoners. Systemic reform is resisted and those who won't toe the line become scapegoats. But is this really the way it is? Are penitentiaries the modern social and cultural equivalents of a millenniums-old church? They may be flawed, but I honestly don't believe they're beyond reform. The corrupt and self-interested characters representing the law and order side in this book are so cartoonishly evil that I think MacIntyre really missed the boat on framing this story as a conflict of conscience; anyone should have behaved as Breau did.
Slow and meandering, deliberately obscure and agenda-driven, this is not my favourite book by Linden MacIntyre.
