Seamus, a library orderly at HMP Thameside, an all-male, category B prison in south-east London is a fan of The Hunger Games.
“I like a strong-minded woman. She reminds me of my mother,” he says.
Seamus is showing me around HMP Thameside’s library. As we walk, we talk books: he talks about The Hunger Games, reveals he is also a fan of Harry Potter. I ask him what he thinks of J. K. Rowling’s heroine. He grins, tells me he wants to call his daughter Hermione.
If a book can start a conversation, then just think what can spring from a whole library. As we mourn and fight the closure of many of our public libraries, the crucial roles that they play in a community seem especially clear here in the library at HMP Thameside. Prison rules - to which all UK prisons must adhere - state that every prisoner is entitled to 30 minutes of library browsing time at least once a fortnight. Browsing, however, seems to be the least of it: this library isn’t so much a place of silent, solitary shelf-scanning as a place where books bring people together.
I’m here to visit the prison’s weekly book club. Six men burst through the library doors, holding copies of White Teeth by Zadie Smith.
Arthur, a frequent attender, tells me in passing that there are usually a few more of them, but there’s just been “an incident”. The words are left hanging as everyone takes a seat.
The book club is led by Maggie, who is a volunteer for Prison Reading Groups, a partnership between the University of Roehampton and the Prisoners’ Education Trust. She asks everyone to introduce themselves and share their initial thoughts about the book.
“It’s not my usual thing,” says Steven, who seems shy, sitting hunched in his chair. “I usually go for horror and fantasy, but it really pulled me in. I read the whole thing - I wanted to find out what happens.”
Arthur has only read 10 pages, but still has plenty to say. “I think she’s incredibly modern and zeitgeisty. Has she been compared to Hanif Kureishi, who wrote The Buddha of Suburbia? I’m automatically going to favour Zadie Smith over him because unfortunately we still live in a hideously sexist world, and it’s really refreshing to have things from a female perspective.”
He remembers the TV adaptation of White Teeth coming out soon after his youngest daughter was born: “I remember back then feeling really pleased it was written by a woman.”
“I thought it was a bit patronising,” injects Khalid. “I thought there was a bit too much about race and old-fashioned racism in it. I’m second generation, from Birmingham, but one of my parents is Indian and the other’s Welsh.”
Like Seamus, Khalid is a library orderly - and seems very proud of his role. He is keen to explain to me how it all works; later, he takes me to his cell to show me how the details for the next book club are announced on the prison intranet. Why does Khalid like reading so much? Well, he’s “banged up” in his cell from six o’clock every evening: “But you pick up a book, and the next thing you know it’s 10 o’clock. For that time, when I’m reading, I don’t think I’m in prison.”
One of the reasons former justice secretary Chris Grayling banned the sending of books to prisons - a ban that was ruled unlawful by the high court and lifted by his successor, Michael Gove - is because of what can be hidden inside them: drugs, weapons, objects that might aid an escape. In Khalid’s tiny but very tidy cell, amid the clanging and shouting of the prison wing, the words on the page seem like the best escape tools of all.
Khalid hands me his copy of Revolution by Russell Brand, and tells me how he showed Brand around when the celebrity visited the prison. He opens the book to the title page, where Brand has written, “You are free”.
Back in the library, a lengthy discussion ensues about the nuances of Zadie Smith’s humour.
“You’ve got to be able to joke about everything,” says Arthur. “Humour breaks everything down.”
Errol, in his dark green prison-issue tracksuit, asks if we think there’s any subject that shouldn’t be laughed about. Maggie tentatively suggests the Holocaust; Errol say he’s heard “tons of jokes” about it. Arthur adds that prisoners in concentration camps used humour to survive.
“It’s true, it’s a means of survival,” says Errol. “Some of the funniest guys ever are the prisoners who are in for life sentences.”
We cover satire, situational comedy and then move on to slang. Everyone agrees that Smith has got her characters’ voices just right.
Not everyone in the group is as boisterous as Errol and Arthur. George, a quiet, slight man, explains that the aspect he likes best about White Teeth is the way history is shown to repeat itself: “It reminds me of A Hundred Years of Solitude.”
He saves his real passion for murder mystery novels, especially Agatha Christie, because, he says, “they’re always about a closed community”.
Nathan, who describes himself as a poet, says The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide is his favourite of the recent book club choices, “because of the language in it”.
We are still in full flow when the prison guard asks us to wrap up; the hour has passed in a flash. Errol insists on saying one last thing before we go.
“I’ve made a connection with books and people,” he says. “Oftentimes I pick up a book and think ‘oh, this is a waste of time, I really can’t be bothered with it’. Only it very rarely is. Thanks to the clubs, I always persevere with books, and I’m so pleased when I get to the end of them. But it’s the same thing I’ve got to start doing with people. You have to stick with them and then you might really like them. I think I need to start giving people more of a chance, I need to read a few more of their chapters.”
I leave HMP Thameside feeling that nowhere has the connection between books and people felt so strong as it does in their library.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd.
