Freed at last from prison, scarred and angry

By Kenneth J. Harvey

Harcourt. 288 pp. $24

Reviewed by Dan DeLuca

On the first page of Kenneth J. Harvey's eighth novel, a man whose first name we never learn - his last is Myrden - walks out of his prison cell.

He's been inside for 14 years, but as a result of newly discovered DNA evidence is now free. "They had made a mistake. They had realized. Everything he had moved through. The trail behind him. The institutional walls that kept him. The day in and day out. The tangle of men. It was meant to go away."

But of course, it doesn't go away. The rage that Myrden has bottled up inside, the scars he bears from spending a decade and a half behind bars for murdering a woman he may or may not have killed, stick with him throughout this claustrophobic, punishing book.

So too does Harvey's blunt, taciturn prose style in a stream-of-consciousness story told from the point of view of a violent, hard-drinking, seemingly inarticulate man whose cautious observations of the world outside come at us in short, often fragmented sentences that take some getting used to and can make

Inside

difficult to follow.

Here's Myrden, at a welcome-home party at his house, where his wife now lives with another man. "He took another swig of beer. Felt a little better. The beer tasted good but not the same. Something out of whack with everyone in the room. Something missing. Something wrong. Everyone too close together. Not keeping to themselves. In a row. On a unit. Lockdown. And those people outside the window. What they knew about him being innocent. Who believed it? A technicality. That's all."

That terse interior monologue continues throughout the 16th book by Harvey, who lives in Newfoundland, where

Inside

is set, and has a growing reputation as a writer's writer. He's also got a knack for enticingly titled books, such as the poetry collection

Kill the Poets

and essays

Everyone Hates a Beauty Queen

. J.M. Coetzee called his last book,

The Town That Forgot How to Breathe

, "the work of an extravagantly haunted imagination," and

Inside

, which was published in 2006 in Canada and the United Kingdom, has been praised by John Banville, among others.

Early on in

Inside

, as Myrden comes home to encounter characters out of his violent past, his troubled children, and a woman who loves him who has gone though tragedies of her own, I found Harvey's voice to be overly stylized in its self-conscious simplicity. Here he is visiting his daughter: "What did she know about it? How much? The mess he was in. She was peeling carrots. With a peeler in her hands. Then a knife cutting pieces out of them. Not coin shaped but strips. That's how she made soup."

But as

Inside

- which has already won a pair of Canadian literary awards and is long-listed for the Giller Prize and the Dublin IMPAC Award - progresses, Myrden's view of the world and Harvey's depiction of it grow powerfully compelling.

That's partly because Harvey's way with language grows psychologically acute, once you get used to it. And it's partly because Myrden, for all of his inexpressiveness and tendencies toward violence, is a basically decent human being who's worth rooting for, as he contends with hangers-on who are looking for a piece of the multimillion-dollar settlement he's due from the government, and with former compadres who stand to become suspects now that he's been exonerated.

When he pays a visit to the man whose testimony helped convict him, he's threatened by his enemy's crowbar-wielding mother. And when he muses to himself about the fateful night, he can't even remember who the guilty party was. "It was blank to him. A blank that dropped him deeper when he thought of Doreen Stagg's name. Nowhere for his feet to land. Her face when she was alive. Who had been there? He didn't even know. He couldn't say one way or the other. Who he'd been drinking with."

Inside

is a haunted account of a man's struggle to leave his past behind and feel wholly alive on the outside, even as he still carries within him what he became when he was inside.