THE novel warning us against the evil of one thing or another is in a genre all of its own, or should be. I recall finding one such novel in a cardboard box somewhere, at an early - I was going to say impressionable, but actually I am still impressionable age, and reading it avidly.
It was written in the last century and set out to warn its readers of the dangers of alcohol, a task in which it succeeded admirably. When I say it succeeded admirably I mean that I was admirably warned, but I was not, as it later turned out, warned off the demon drink.
The Rasherhouse reminded me of that long-lost novel in its depiction of the horrendous decline of its heroine - no pun intended - after she learns to shoot up heroin in Mountjoy Women's Prison.
Mags is a 17-year-old lone mother who is jailed for persistent shop- lifting. She is horrified to discover that she has to share a cell with two other women, one of whom is a violent, loud-mouthed drug-pusher and the other of whom is an addict.
It is the fact that she has to share a cell at all that shocks her - and it is probably true to say that most of us, if we fantasise about being in prison, imagine being in a cell on our own in which we will have, at last, no excuse for not reading Ulysses all the way through.
Mags falls in love with Dommo, a chancer in the male prison, who is mistakenly accused of supplying heroin to other prisoners, is punished, shoots up once herself as a result and immediately finds herself having the most beautiful experience of her life.
From there it is downhill all the way - release, setting up a doomed household with Dommo, being put on the game to feed their habit and ending up, inevitably, in prison again when an attempt to smuggle drugs into the country goes wrong.
Things then get even worse for her, with tragic results.
The book paints a dismal picture of life in Mountjoy Women's Prison. Concentrating, as it does, on the happenings in one cell, it gives the impression that drug addiction is rife there. The statutory lesbian sex scenes are included - though not in sufficient quantity to warrant buying the book for that reason alone.
Curiously, the male warders in the prison are depicted as wise, kindly old codgers who deliver themselves of statements such as "Sure you'll be out of here and home again in no time, so you will now." The female warders are depicted, by and large, as dour and cynical, an entirely understandable attitude given what they have to put up with.
The author, Alan Roberts, teaches philosophy in Mountjoy, so presumably the ladies in question will take the matter up with him if they are unhappy with their depiction.
It is not so much the evil of drugs as the evil of prison which the author seems to want to convince us of. The text is interspersed with comments from a fictional retired civil servant from the Department of Justice. This gentleman is opposed to all forms of progress, to liberalism, to feminism, to educating prisoners and to any namby-pamby cosseting of wrongdoers.
It seems fair to say that we, the readers, are expected to find this gentleman's views regrettable and regressive. Yet the criminal underworld, as depicted by the author, seems filled with people whom one cannot do an awful lot with. Prison seems to be a part of the awfulness of that world rather than a cause of its awfulness.
If ever there was a case for working with children to prevent them from ever sinking to the depths depicted here, this book makes it, without doing so explicitly.
And it leaves the reader wondering why, given the horrors that go with heroin addiction, people still go out and get themselves addicted. Could it be that some, at least, of these are people for whom heroin feels like the only good thing that ever happened to them in their lives - and how do you combat that?
