DNF A Gentleman in Moscow Amor Towles
(BTW is it possible to bold AND strikethrough?)
I belong to the Facebook group "First Edition" which is a books/reading group run by the Sunday Times, and this book is like their TTOD. Everyone loves it, and when someone posts to say they're reading it, everyone falls over themselves to gush about how amazing it is.
Sadly I found myself about 1/4 of the way in and just bored. It's not terrible but rather slow and episodic, and I wasn't on board with the set-up (1920s Russia, terrible things happening, aristocrat is the epitome of style, taste and good sense while under house arrest in a luxury hotel).
Gave up and moved on to
72. A Bit of a Stretch, Chris Atkins
Best-selling prison diary by a left-wing documentary maker, done for funding his project through dodgy means and given a five year sentence - meaning he served 2.5 years, the first nine months of which he spent in Wandsworth prison.
OK, so the good stuff first. This is a very readable, very honest account of what it's REALLY like in prison, by someone who obviously never expected to find themselves there. It was certainly an eye-opener, and Atkins has said that his hope is that people will learn about the problems in prisons and push the Government for change.
I found Atkins as author hard to like. He comes from a comfortable, privileged background where doors open to him by default, which means that prison comes as a bit of a shock. Not as much of a shock, though, as you might think, as within a couple of weeks of arrival he has been picked up by a group of privately-educated, middle class prisoners who he refers to as the White Collar Gang (or, sometimes, tellingly without the ironic capital letters, the white-collar clique). These articulate and well-educated men have baggsied the biggest and most comfortable cells and the jobs which allow them to walk freely around the wings, calling their families when the phones are quiet (because everyone else is locked up for up to 23 hours a day), treating the prison officers as equals at best, annoying inferiors at worst. One man who Atkins particularly likes has invented a scheme which means that his cell is unlocked early on a Saturday morning, giving him access to the phone and showers - he has told the prison authorities that he is providing peer-to-peer support to fellow prisoners who have devastatingly low levels of literacy and are struggling to understand the prison systems, which run on antiquated admin, often relying on paper forms to get anything done. The problem with this is that, while this support is obviously desperately needed, Atkins' friend is not providing it at all - he has simply made the scheme up in order to get his door unlocked (and he complains if this doesn't happen). Atkins thinks this is a great wheeze. The unusually large, relatively comfortable cell that they occupy is supposed to be for "Listeners" - prisoners trained by the Samaritans to help other prisoners in moments of crisis - but Atkins is moved in because his face fits, despite not being a Listener. When his cellmate moves out, he moves in another guy who he has chosen on the basis that he is a banker, and as middle class as they come, despite the fact that he is not a Listener, will not start Listener training for several months if at all, and is barely known to Atkins. His face fits though, he fits into the White Collar Gang, so in he comes to the large comfy cell with the frequently open door.
To be fair, if I was in Wandsworth Prison and someone gave me access to privileges like this, I would grab them with both hands, so I can't blame him, but there's little self-reflection in the book: no consideration of whether others may have been more deserving of, or had their lives changed by, some of these privileges, no thoughts about whether pretending to help others actually makes their situation worse. Generally, Atkins takes an Adam Kay-like approach: "Oh, let me tell you a funny story about someone going through an absolutely horrendous experience in front of me - I mean, yes, how awful, but really, it's funny! I mean, it didn't happen to me or any of my friends and probably never will so we can all have a good laugh!". It's only in the afterword that he acknowledges that the support networks that he had both outside prison and inside, plus the fact that "I was educated, white, middle class, relatively aflfuent, and I didn't have a mental illness" gave him a smooth ride through prison, and saved him from much of the anguish and violence that he saw around him. Towards the end of the book he blithely opines "I think everyone should spend a little bit of time in prison". To be fair to Atkins, he does seem to become more compassionate during his time inside - certainly he moves from just occupying the Listener cell to being a Listener, on call night after night to listen to the problems of others, which i am sure was a genuine force for good in a place with many many problems.
Putting aside my general distaste for privileged men writing "funny" books about social problems which impact others, I wish this book had been a little less lightweight. Maybe that came from the editing, I don't know. Atkins is a documentary maker and I would have expected him to dig a bit more into the story behind the things he sees. The format here is usually funny-terrible story (Atkins' cellmate struggles to get medical treatment for a life-threatening infection, instead being locked back up with two paracetamol) followed by text box with some basic facts relating to the story (two paragraphs on the insufficiencies of medical care in prisons and the fact that these were identified in a report which wasn't actioned). I would have liked a LOT more on how things got this bad, what has been done to try to address the issues, why hasn't it worked etc - I guess the fact that I was pulled in so compulsively means that the book was a success in some ways.