When you are languishing in a prison cell, you can become intensely creative. John Bunyan, Jean Genet, and Miguel de Cervantes used their time to write classic works of literature. On the eve of his hanging, Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini wrote a memoir to explain why he set out to murder eight people. Louis is fictional, the anti-hero of the film Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).
The narrator named D in Mural is also fictional, and he is a prisoner in an Australian psychiatric institution, guilty of unspecified but hideously violent crimes. It turns out he is as smart and wily as Hannibal Lecter, if more inclined to ramble.
Mural by Stephen Downes
Transit Lounge, $32.99 hb, 200 pp
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