19 September 2019

Book Club Psychedelia

High on literature.

By Neil Tidmarsh

Inmates of some of Her Majesty’s prisons are still being deprived of reading material sent to them from outside, five years after the high court overturned justice secretary Chris Grayling’s ban.  Why?  Mystery compounds scandal.

This week, however, an explanation was forthcoming; we were told that books are often used to smuggle recreational drugs into prisons – the senders soak pages in a solution of the illicit chemicals (try doing that on a Kindle) which, once dry, makes detection very difficult.

Which might explain this otherwise puzzling report of a recent meeting of the book club at HM prison Parkville Scrubs:

 

VOLUNTEER VISITOR:  Morning, everyone.  Have you all managed to read this week’s book club choice?  The Warden by Anthony Trollope.  A classic of nineteenth-century literature.  A gentle and charming story about tradition versus reform in a community of Victorian clergymen in an English cathedral city.  Good.  Did you enjoy it?

PRISONER A:  Loved it.  When that geezer – that old vicar, what’s his name, Septimus Harding – becomes an ace-guitarist rock god after forming an old-school thrash metal band, The Precentor of Hiram, with the other old guys in the hospital – brilliant!

VISITOR:  What?

PRISONER A:  And then that record producer John Bold, cocky young bastard, wants the label to dump them because he reckons gangsta rap is the only happening sound, well –

VISITOR:  What? Sorry?

PRISONER A:  Yeah! Ain’t you read it?  It all kicks off round page twenty-five, here – (Shuffles through the book – but pages twenty five to thirty have been torn out) – Ah! – yes – right – I remember now…

VISITOR:  But – why did you tear them out?  What’s happened to them?

PRISONER A:  I… er… I ate them… because… ah… I was hungry… um… there was nothing else to eat… we was locked in for twelve hours…

PRISONER B:   But Septimus Harding’s really an Archangel, isn’t he, and John Bold is Satan, and there’s this brilliant battle at the end, they fight it out from one end of Hiram’s Hospital to the other, with light-sabres and massive guns and bombs and tanks and things, and –

PRISONER C:  And John Bold’s got this army of werewolves and vampires and zombies, and they’ve kidnapped Harding’s daughter Eleanor, but luckily the Bishop of Barchester and Archdeacon Grantly and the barrister Sir Abraham Haphazard are all really powerful white wizards and they use their magic to help Harding…

PRISONER B:  Sir Abraham Haphazard?  A white wizard?  Rubbish!  He’s a CIA agent gone rogue, a double-agent, who turns out to be an alien/human hybrid who –

PRISONER C:  He’s a white wizard!  Look, on page sixty-one (rifles through his copy – page sixty-one has been torn out) – what? – oh – ah – yes – I remember…

PRISONER A:  But isn’t it great when the Rev Harding takes the band up to London for the gig in Lincoln’s Inn which Sir Abraham Haphazard has fixed up for them, and they blast Lincoln’s Inn apart, and smash up their hotel room, and take a bus-load of groupies back to Barchester.  Best scene in the whole book!

PRISONER C:  Best scene?  No way!  That’s the orgy scene at The Jupiter, where Eleanor manages to escape from the werewolf Tom Towers and the vampire Dr Pessimist Anticant and the zombie Mr Popular Sentiment, while they’re busy doing that –

PRISONER B:  I’ll tell you what the best scene in the book is!  That final epic battle, when the invading aliens end up dropping a thermo-nuclear bomb on Hiram’s Hospital!

VISITOR:  (Scratching his head, and rapidly flicking through the pages of his copy, utterly bewildered)  Well, um, I was going to recommend Trollope’s Barchester Towers, the next book in the series, for next week’s book club choice, but… (shakes his head)  I’m not so sure now…

PRISONER A:  There’s more of this stuff?  Fantastic!

VISITOR:  Yes, The Warden is the first in a series of six novels, Trollope’s The Chronicles of Barsetshire.

PRISONER B:  Bring it on!  So Barchester Towers must be about the survivors of that thermo-nuclear attack!   Mutants, hunted by aliens through the radio-active ruins of Hiram’s Hospital…

PRISONER C:  Hang on, what’s wrong with Prisoner D?  He hasn’t said a word all morning, and now he’s crying his eyes out!

PRISONER D:  (weeping, and tearing pages out of his book and stuffing them into his mouth)  Beautiful!  It’s so beautiful!

VISITOR:  What’s he reading? That isn’t Trollope.  Oh, it’s Dracula, by Bram Stoker.  Well, that is rather frightening.  No wonder he’s so upset.

PRISONER D:  But it’s beautiful!  It’s about the Count, this really evil guy from the Balkans, all-powerful, ruthless, everyone’s terrified of him –

PRISONER A:  Brilliant!

PRISONER B:  Respect!

PRISONER C:  Go, Dracula, go, mate!

PRISONER D:  But then he comes to England, and he turns his life round, he goes straight and becomes respectable and honest –

PRISONER A: Oh no!  Horrible!  Disgusting!

PRISONER C:  Honest?  Respectable?  What a nightmare! Terrifying!

PRISONER B:  Yeah, that’s really letting the side down, what a nonce!

PRISONER D:  He qualifies as a doctor, marries a nice English girl, settles down, fully integrated, a real immigrant success story, lovely family, becomes professionally successful, a valued member of society –

PRISONER A:  Hang on, this ain’t right, this is going too far –

PRISONER D:  He’s a brilliant and noble human being, he invents blood transfusion, which saves millions of lives, he’s knighted, he enters the House of Lords –

PRISONER B:  Here, look at him, he’s having a really bad trip!

PRISONER D:  He’s appointed Great Britain’s ambassador to Transylvania, so he goes back to the Balkans, and on a diplomatic mission to neighbouring Serbia he persuades Gavrilo Princip and the rest of his gang not to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo –

PRISONER C:  He’s overdosing on them pages!  Stop him, someone, before it’s too late!

PRISONER D:  So World War I never happens!  He stops it, single-handed!  All those lives saved, all that bloodshed prevented!

PRISONER A:  We’ve got to help him!  This is an emergency!  We’ve got to get him to the prison hospital!  Quick!

PRISONER D:  But it’s beautiful! So beautiful!

(Prison guards rush into the room, followed by prison doctor)

GUARD:  Right, off to the infirmary with you, Prisoner D, matey.  And back to your cells, all the rest of you!  I always said reading ain’t good for you.  If God had meant us to spend our lives reading He wouldn’t have invented the telly, let alone Netflix.

(The book club disperses.)