THE four prisoners tie up the fifth one's arms and legs and hang him upside down from the ceiling of his cell. They make him into a punch bag. They lay into him. One of the who works out a lot and himself as a bit of a Mike Tyson, gives him two or three punches a second. Another kicks him repeatedly in the face. Mike Tyson slips in the blood and when he gets up he punches the man so hard the onlooker thinks he is going to kill him.
The four are exhausted now. The man is still alive, gasping wheezily for air, his eyelids flickering. One of the men takes out a blade and tears off the man's shirt. He steadies the man on the rope, puts the blade to his back and opens him from the base of his spine to his neck. The blood gushes and the man screams. The onlooker can take no more and runs away.
The onlooker is the anonymous narrator of The Joy, whose account of his experiences in prison have been marvelously edited by Paul Howard. Shortly after that nightmarish scene, we are told about Redser, who barricades himself into his cell in protest at the authorities plan to move four Travellers into his cell with him.
He announces his intention to go on hunger strike until the decision is reversed. To ensure success he gets the narrator to go around collecting Mars bars and other delicacies "so at least they can't starve me out". The kickers (the Mountjoy riot squad) ended his hunger strike and hauled him away after an hour and a half, "with Redser emerging, I'd say, a few pound heavier than when it had begun".
This just a position of violence and comedy is among the devices which make this book such a compelling read.
By the way, despite the name "kickers", there appears to be no violence directed towards prisoners by warders or gardai, on the evidence of this book.
Though the narrator is HIV positive and very pessimistic about his life expectancy by the time the book ends, he never descends into mawkish appeals for sympathy.
Instead, he keeps the stories rolling, one after another, in a hypnotic way.
It is not a book to read at breakfast. There is no shortage of disgusting scenes at least to this middle class palate. But there is also no shortage of scenes which provide an extraordinary view of a way of life so different to that most of us in this society that we can never understand it.
Cutting up country prisoners with blades set into toothbrushes seems to be an accepted way of carrying on at Mountjoy. The same goes for Cork prison, whose denizens reserve a similar greeting for Dubliners. Yet while we are tutting at this, told to us while the narrator is he thinks on his way to Cork for spitting at a warder in Mountjoy, we are into comedy again with his utter consternation at finding he is on the way to Spike Island "it's really just dormitories full of annoying little adolescent pricks who think their joy riding convictions make them hard men."
This book leaves the reader with little sympathy for the prisoners. There are people in there whom you would not want to have anywhere else like Mad Frankie, who hides broken razor blades in butter and feeds it to seagulls because he likes to watch them die.
The pervasiveness of heroin addiction in Mountjoy, the willingness of addicts to shoot any rubbish into themselves, and the pointlessness of life there, all come across sharply.
Paul Howard is described in the blurb as a journalist and qualified criminologist. Those who read The Joy will look forward to reading much more from him in future years.