The main penitentiary gate opened on schedule, without any last minute hitch. Sandra Treming and four other old cons walked out into a rainy Monday morning.
The first scene in Through Thorns packs in a lot. Sandra Treming is notorious, serving a life sentence. She has what the authorities call ‘attitude’; no time off for good behaviour, but none added on for bad. She is terrified of the outside world and so ill-equipped for it that she doesn’t know how to use a seatbelt in a car.
Through Thorns is a fast paced story told in two timelines. One is how Sandra survives in the world outside prison in 2007, the other is how she came to be convicted 25 years earlier. The main thrust of the plot is laid out quickly. The twists and turns are in the details and the attraction is in the author’s compassionate attitude towards some of his characters, his skilful pillorying of others and his ability to create a community of people who are at the same time both absurd and believable.
Sandra in 1982 lives in the Alexander Berkman Collective. According to her own memories she ended up there because she was a runaway with nowhere to go and was befriended by two of the collective members. The collective is the sort of place where they have house meetings about buying groceries that end in members walking out because they are not ‘interested in participating in group struggle that doesn’t advance the revolution’. Whether this reminds you of Monty Python, One Day in the Death of Ivan Denisovich or house-shares you once were part of is all part of the cleverness of this writing. These people are naïve, laughable and dangerous. Or would be dangerous, if they ever reached a decision. When that disaffected member storms out the meeting no longer has a quorum which means, believe it or not, they can’t buy groceries. They so despise capitalist, bourgeois society that they won’t work, take money from parents or accept government payments. Their only sanctioned way of obtaining the necessities of life is through ‘liberating’ property. And that, plus some actual decisions, is where it all goes wrong.
Sandra in 2007 is an ex-prisoner in a hostile world. People who should help her, a steward of a half-way house, a parole officer, are cleverly skewered by the author. There are elements of farce here but also elements of devastating truth. Who hasn’t been humiliated by an official at some time in their life? And the more vulnerable you are the more likely you are to be humiliated.
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t have you apprehended,” Case officer barked.
“Sorry?” Sandra played contrite to mask the indignation she felt.
“I contacted the halfway house. You weren’t there. In fact, they have no record of you checking in. So, where the hell have you been?”
“I’m staying at a hostel downtown.” She kept her voice neutral. Perhaps, if she didn’t push any buttons, she could weather this storm.
“You’re required to keep this office informed of your place of residence at all times. Why didn’t you tell us about this move?”
“I did, I—”
“You’re lying. I took careful notes from our meeting. You didn’t say anything about where you were staying.”
Sandra pointed to the receptionist. “I wrote the address on the registration form she gave me.”
And she had. And when it’s proven that she did, do either he or the receptionist apologise for their lack of communication? You guessed it, no, it’s all Sandra’s responsibility; the responsibility of the vulnerable, homeless and jobless person that they are paid, out of the public purse, to help.
There is a lot of social commentary in this book, and a lot of compassion for the less fortunate and capable. Because her room at the halfway house has gone, Sandra checks into the homeless shelter next door. There the locker she is assigned is broken and all her money is stolen in the night. Angela, refused permission to take her shopping carts full of junk into the shelter, takes Sandra somewhere to sleep that is safer. Safer means behind a bramble thicket under a freeway overpass.
Sandra has a habit of being decisive in the wrong ways. She left the apartment her former comrade found for her. She went to a hostel instead of the halfway house. She stayed in the homeless shelter when she knew her possessions weren’t safe. You could say making decisions that work out badly is a character trait. And that’s nothing compared to some of the decisions she made 25 years before. Yet she has a nature that is open to Angela and to others. Will she survive in this world outside prison with so much stacked against her? That’s a later part of the story, after the thorns, when things get a bit less Monty Python and a bit more modern fairy tale.
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