Verbal Magazine

A Good Day for a Dog

---

Carlo Gébler’s stark novel deals mainly with the lives of two representative prisoners in a number of identifiable prisons in Northern Ireland. The account is mediated through the lives of the two inmates, one introduced two thirds of the way through the book and given thirty pages of biography, skewing the structure a little. 

He is Willie Mullen, a young Protestant paramilitary, guilty of a cold-blooded killing of a Catholic but sent to a politically neutral jail, to be with ‘ordinary decent criminals’ thanks to the influence of his mother.
The main protagonist, is the nominally over-endowed, Stephen Gerard Declan Pearse Melanophy, but known as Nank from an early prison baptism. He was abused physically and sexually as a child by a brutish father and became a thief soon after the beginnings of the abuse. It is not clear whether the stealing is a kind of compensatory kleptomania or done for profit. It becomes as regular as if it were addictive and Melanophy makes a career of criminality, used mainly as a courier for drug running. On one regular run there is an IRA alert, his van is searched and Nank, as he now refers to himself, is sent to Loanend Prison, for a twelve-year stretch for holding drugs with intent to supply and having in his possession a firearm.
What follows makes grim reading. The account of Nank’s career till now has been rather like a psychologist’s case history, terse and rather depersonalised. It has been hard to find sympathy for any of the characters but the final two fifths of the novel describing the hell of the top security prison calls for another Elizabeth Fry. The weak go literally to the wall and ‘roots’, as homosexuals are called, are forced to eat razorblades. It is a sociological truism that the screws are prisoners too and the tolerance of other hierarchies among the inmates makes their job a bit easier. The exact details of the induction of new arrivals, the watchful misery of visiting days, the temporary ease that the orally smuggled substances give, the jockeying for softer jobs within the prison are all fascinating, if offering no comfort.
Nank has a patient wife who manages with remarkable ingenuity, described in detail, to become pregnant during a ‘closed’ but ‘observed’ prison visit and the presentation of the resulting baby, passed off as his nephew, gives him the motivation to thole the remaining two years until he qualifies for release under remission. His euphoric description of the visit to the warder as ‘a good day for a dog’, gives the book its title. That episode and a few brief flashes of eroticism are all that relieves this grim document. There is no doubt about Gébler’s capacity to harrow us. He does dark well and the fates of Nank and Willie stay with the reader long after the main gate of HMP Loanend has closed.

See our interview with Carlo Gebler on Page 4.

Sean McMahon

back to top