Punishment - Linden MacIntyre

Punishment

MacIntyre, Linden. Punishment. Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2014

Punishment would make a great choice as background reading for discussions surrounding the Law and Order agenda that's become a trademark of the current Canadian government. Appropriately, it opens up a whole range of questions about guilt, innocence and the possibility that a justice system capable of actually dispensing impartial justice may be illusory. From the police on down through the court and penitentiary systems, anyone suspected of and/or charged and convicted of a crime is at the mercy of humans—not gods—and people carry baggage, preferences and prejudices that present a multitude of possibilities for guilt-escaping-punishment or innocence-paying-an unjust-price.

      The novel opens with an incident in the Kingston Penitentiary: prison guards know there's a rumble going on in a cell block but choose to ignore it, a prisoner is killed and a cover-up follows. One guard, Tony Breau, decides to tell a subsequent enquiry the truth, thereby becoming a “rat,” among his fellow guards. A prisoner, Strickland, feeds a bit of information to Breau, thereby making him a “rat” in the prison population. Both become vulnerable; both are “rats.” Breau takes early retirement and goes back home to the small town where he grew up; Strickland finishes his sentence and returns to his childhood home just down the road from Breau.              

     Punishment spins out a gripping tale of life beyond this point, two lives shunted toward inevitable “rough justice,” fueled by past suspicions, prejudices and the inbred vagaries of a small town that can't forgive and never forgets.

      I've no intention of retelling MacIntyre's story here; suffice it to say that it has all the ingredients of a dramatic who-done-it, including dogs barking in the night, isolated houses locked in the grip of Canadian winter, and smiles that hide sinister motives. The plot kept me reading but having admired Linden MacIntyre's investigative journalistic talents on CBC's Fifth Estate for many years, I kept thinking: “what were the occasions and the nature of the research behind this plot, these characters?”

      MacIntyre's book dedication provides one clue: In memory of Ernie Hayes, AKA Tyrone W. Conn, 1967 – 1999. I wasn't aware that MacIntyre and Fifth Estate producer, Theresa Burke, had written a book in 2002—Who killed Ty Conn—about the life and death of an habitually-incarcerated offender. Their hope was that given Conn's history of abuse and neglect in childhood and youth, the book would provide insight for dealing with juvenile offenders in a more empathetic manner than was the case with Conn. Quite likely, MacIntyre had memories of that book and his personal knowledge of Ty Conn in his mind when he created the character Strickland. Readers of this latest novel will want to check out the story of MacIntyre's and Burke's experiences with Conn leading to the writing of the earlier book by clicking here.

      But Strickland's story is a subplot, a sub-theme in Punishment. Tony Breau's life, like Strickland's, is complicated, including early adoption into a community of strangers, made-and-lost relationships and the very human longing for a comfortable place to be in a broken world. Broken cultures produce broken children who grow up to be broken adults; our justice and penal systems will always be overwhelmed with a responsibility for fixing the same brokenness that the system has caused. What we can do—and do do—is punish; what we are ill-equipped to effect is prevention.

      But it's not necessary to deal with global issues to be absorbed by MacIntyre's novel. Like all good novels it stands on its own as a tale of human struggle, defeat and survival—with enough of hope and redemption to balance the trials that are—in the end—the inescapable conditions of human life. I had flashbacks to another, older novel exploring similar themes to Punishment: Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment specifically. The guilt of Rodion Raskolnikov and that of Tony Breau bear similarities, but guilt is never black on white; guilt has precedents, deviance happens in an environment, human perceptions of events are partial, often foggy, and the response to deviance is driven by prejudice and rage as often as by cool rationality.

      Besides his work on Fifth Estate, Linden MacIntyre is probably best known for his novel, The Bishop's Man. It was awarded the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Canadian Booksellers Association's Fiction Book of the Year.