America at the end of the twenty-first century: a world of droughts; advanced technology; and boys identified with the gene for criminality compulsorily enrolled in corrective institutions from the age of three. James is one such child: a Level 1 student with the prospect of a decent life on graduation in under a year’s time. That’s if he can abide by the school’s strict regulations to avoid accumulating any “demerits” and prevent the memories of a vicious arson attack on his previous school from disturbing his calm. Yet, brutal as the school may be, James is anxious about venturing into the civilian world with its confusing freedoms and potential encounters with the hostile Zeros, religious fundamentalists intent on purifying the world by fire. When, on his first Community Day outing, he steals a girl’s barrette hair slide, a set of progressively harsher punishments is set in train which sees James, not only losing his relatively protected status, but uncovering a network of corruption within the school far deadlier than he could have imagined.
This is a disturbing read, not only in the descriptions of extreme control and cruelty as chilling as those depicted in The Orphan Master’s Son, but in the all-too-clear parallels between this imagined dystopia and the supposedly civilised world. We do turn a blind eye to the treatment of polite society’s rejects, enabling abuse of prisoners and captives, some of them children, to go undetected for too long. Some do hope for genetic profiling as a method of crime prevention. People are drawn to political parties and religious movements that develop self-serving rationales for the persecution of outsiders. The powerless have been coerced to take part in risky medical research. Some employers do treat their employees like slaves, docking the wages of those who fail to carry out their duties within pre-set time boundaries that don’t allow for ordinary human variations. Some professionals are so idealised no criticism of their practice will be believed (as with the abusive priests in A History of Loneliness). Private enterprise does profit financially from other people’s misery. Peyton Marshall based her novel on the juvenile justice system in the recent past and in America today.
It comes as no consolation to detect the residues of good intention within the fifty-year-old Goodhouse system. The meditation and impulse-control techniques the boys have been taught as an attempt to master their supposed antisocial inclinations have limited effectiveness in the absence of compassion for their ordinary humanity. A token economy, a system of rewards to encourage desired behaviours, has been perverted for a means of punishing minor transgressions. The message is that total institutions have an inbuilt capacity to harm, attracting staff with a propensity to abuse their power and brutalising those with a genuine desire to help.
Fortunately, this story does offer the reader some hope of redemption. James is a sympathetic character, a classic hero struggling valiantly against impossible odds. Bethany, the teenage girl he meets on his community outing, is equally determined. The small ways in which the boys defied the regime was reminiscent of the prisoners of war in The Narrow Road to the Deep North as, under strict orders to stay silent, they had devised a palming sign-language like the one that had saved the sanity of death-blind Liza in The Visitors. (In the real world, too, we can find examples of positive programmes for prisoners, such as the sewing project described in a post by Geoff LePard, although some have a tendency to take off in the wrong direction, as in my prison gardening project flash.)
If you like thrillers, if you can tolerate a novel that poses uncomfortable questions about how we treat those we fear and despise, Goodhouse is for you. Thank you Transworld for my proof copy. For more about the novel, and the inspiration behind it, do visit my Q&A with Peyton Marshall.
It comes as no consolation to detect the residues of good intention within the fifty-year-old Goodhouse system. The meditation and impulse-control techniques the boys have been taught as an attempt to master their supposed antisocial inclinations have limited effectiveness in the absence of compassion for their ordinary humanity. A token economy, a system of rewards to encourage desired behaviours, has been perverted for a means of punishing minor transgressions. The message is that total institutions have an inbuilt capacity to harm, attracting staff with a propensity to abuse their power and brutalising those with a genuine desire to help.
Fortunately, this story does offer the reader some hope of redemption. James is a sympathetic character, a classic hero struggling valiantly against impossible odds. Bethany, the teenage girl he meets on his community outing, is equally determined. The small ways in which the boys defied the regime was reminiscent of the prisoners of war in The Narrow Road to the Deep North as, under strict orders to stay silent, they had devised a palming sign-language like the one that had saved the sanity of death-blind Liza in The Visitors. (In the real world, too, we can find examples of positive programmes for prisoners, such as the sewing project described in a post by Geoff LePard, although some have a tendency to take off in the wrong direction, as in my prison gardening project flash.)
If you like thrillers, if you can tolerate a novel that poses uncomfortable questions about how we treat those we fear and despise, Goodhouse is for you. Thank you Transworld for my proof copy. For more about the novel, and the inspiration behind it, do visit my Q&A with Peyton Marshall.
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