Inside

Winner of both the Roger’s Writers Trust Fiction Prize and the Winterset Award, Kenneth J. Harvey’s novel Inside (2006) opens with a release. After a fourteen-year incarceration, Myrden, the novel’s protagonist, leaves a St. John’s jail after his murder conviction is overturned and he is proclaimed an innocent man. Readers soon learn, however, that Myrden’s new circumstances are by no means as freeing as the media, his friends and the general public believe them to be. Though he is soon expected to be a rich man thanks to a government settlement, Myrden returns to a broken family life and realizes that despite his financial windfall he must try harder than ever to redeem himself in the eyes of those around him. Written in a sparse, taut narrative style that is in step with the novel’s dark and violent undercurrents, Harvey’s novel tells the captivating story of a man condemned even after he is publicly vindicated and of how he deals with his own redemption. As the title suggests, Harvey’s novel explores the many facets of what it means to be inside. Inside is a sustained evocation of interiority—through its descriptions of jail and its effects and through Harvey’s deft portrait of the incredible claustrophobia of Myrden’s turbulent inner state, an effect accentuated by the novel’s clipped, staccato style.

Upon release Myrden returns to his wife’s house and is confronted with the fact that life has changed drastically since he entered prison. His wife—now living in a house owned by an unidentified “other” man—is more interested in Myrden’s money than in having him back. His daughter, Jackie, has grown up and has had a child of her own with a husband who was one of Myrden’s nefarious acquaintances from the violent life he led before his sentence. Moreover, her husband, Willis, is the brother of the man whose testimony put Myrden in jail to begin with. Despite this depressing family situation, Myrden sees hope in his granddaughter, Caroline. Though “he knew her only. From a picture on his [jail cell] wall,” Myrden pledges to himself that he will make things right with Caroline. As demonstrated in the narrator’s clipped diction, Myrden’s time in jail has dramatically affected the way he sees others around him. Upon release he has trouble with those who knew him before and who expect him to conform to his previous self. The narrator suggests that being outside is just a different form of incarceration, describing Myrden’s journey through his neighbourhood as being “like a long walk down a corridor. Looking straight ahead. But knowing everything to all sides. Houses. Cells. Windows. People inside. Watching out. Time dead in their eyes.” Myrden also reflects on the role of the media in his figuratively caged existence after his release: “They were impossible. What they asked. To fit it into what they wanted.” Myrden’s friend Randy, however, holds Myrden up to no expectations. Instead, he is one of the few characters who consistently supports Myrden. On one such occasion, Randy beats up a group of Myrden’s old friends after they maliciously refer to the recent death of his son. Softening Randy’s violent response is his comic sensibility—something that extends throughout the novel. Shortly after the fight, when he is asked by a police officer for his name, Randy answers, “Pablo Picasso ... I have come a long way to paint cubes,” pretends to paint the cop’s head and follows up with “You see. My work here is done.” Both Randy’s loyalty and Caroline’s lack of knowledge provide Myrden with opportunities to escape the constant barrage of expectations.

In much the same way that Caroline offers Myrden a chance for redemption, Ruth, a past love of Myrden’s, offers him a vision for a better life in the future. With his wife busy thinking about how she will spend her half of his compensation, Myrden is eager to be away from her as much as possible and thus spends little time at home. One day while visiting the graves of his parents he accidentally meets Ruth, who is there visiting the grave of a baby. As his mother constantly reminded him, Ruth was different from Myrden—“Ruth was from money.” It is with Ruth, however, that Myrden is most able to be himself, and a tentative romance subsequently develops between them. Their association, however, is clearly a relatively rare phenomenon in a city portrayed as being deeply divided along socio-economic lines. Myrden’s lawyer indicates such a division in his response to Myrden’s suggestion that he and his daughter grew up together: “Almost together. I was right on the cusp, the edge. You know what those streets are like. The dividing line.”

Furthermore, Inside consistently draws attention to the physical repercussions of these divisions and disadvantages. This is accomplished primarily through the novel’s depiction of the body and how it is conditioned by the past. After leaving prison, for example, Myrden needs to recondition his body to function in regular daily life. As the narrator indicates shortly after Myrden is released, he is “trying to get back to himself. Trying to get himself back in his body. He felt he did not belong in there.” Unfortunately, however, the prison experience appears to have been too much—Myrden is plagued by heart trouble and anxiety attacks that began while he was incarcerated. While Myrden’s situation best demonstrates the way one’s environment affects one’s physical temperament, other characters in the novel demonstrate a similar conditioning effect. The mother of Grom, the man whose testimony condemned Myrden, betrays her violence-fraught life in the way that “her fingers know ... where they should go” when she calls the police when Myrden comes to visit Grom.

While Myrden’s situation initially appears depressing, his developing relationships with Caroline and Ruth suggest there is real hope for him outside the walls of prison. After his settlement with the government he is able to “buy [Jackie and Caroline] out of Willis’s house” and take a vacation with Ruth to Spain. The narrator relates the importance of the vacation: “He had heard how going could help. Take your mind off your troubles. Give you perspective. He knew that work. He liked it. The more he said it in his mind. Perspective. There were plans in his mind. Plans he could see with everything in perspective.” Ultimately, however, upon returning from his vacation Myrden discovers that this removed perspective is unsuited to the life he has previously led. Confronted with a situation that pulls him back into his previous life, Myrden acts with good intentions but in a way that demonstrates how he is overwhelmed by his circumstances. In this final, implied act Myrden fuses his drive for redemption with his burdensome past and leaves readers to debate the incredible claustrophobia of his circumstances. Narrated in raw and edgy prose, Harvey’s Inside provides a chilling look into the “release” of a wrongfully accused St. John’s man.