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Works by John King Headhunters, White Trash, Skinheads, Human Punk, The Football Factory | ||
The Prison House is the sixth novel written by John King, published in 2004 by Jonathan Cape.
The main character in the book is an Englishman, Jimmy Ramone, who has reached a crossroads in his life. After many months of drifting and drinking his way around Europe he finds himself incarcerated for two years in Seven Towers, a notorious prison in an unnamed south European country.
Although Jimmy has always been an outsider, he is now a fully-fledged alien who doesn't understand the language or customs of the other inmates. The prison is squalid, violent, and full of fear – and the only hope of escape from the nightmare is through the imagination.
As Jimmy delves into the recesses of his mind, his thoughts take on a sometimes hallucinogenic quality. The characters he meets inside Seven Towers push his sanity to the brink: the silent, pyjama-clad Papa with his knitting needle, the cheerful killer and mutilator known as the Butcher, and Dumb Dumb, a deaf mute who is trying to build a better world out of matchsticks. However, Jimmy displays a powerful will to survive, to retain his sanity, and to control his mind. Ultimately the novel is a testament to the strength of the human spirit.
At first Jimmy's crime is not revealed. Various dark possibilities are dangled in front of the reader, until the crucial childhood event that has destabilised his existence is laid bare.
King has said the book 'deals with the choice between retribution and rehabilitation, and notions of birth and innocence'. It is his only novel to date that has been set outside England.
When it was published, literary reviewer Boyd Tonkin of The Independent newspaper argued that The Prison House confirmed King as 'an adventurous avant-garde novelist, firmly in the tradition of what might be called Gutter Modernism'.
The Guardian newspaper noted that The Prison House is written in 'an exhausting prose that can be mesmerically powerful or simply unreadable, depending on your mood and attention span', adding that King 'writes with a straightforward, aggressive intelligence that is perfectly suited to his subject matter, and his frenzied descriptions are exhilarating'.