A PRISONER OF BIRTH

Jeffrey Archer, Pan Macmillan Asia, US$37

This is Jeffrey Archer’s 14th novel and has already been acclaimed as one of his best.

The book is set in London with its central character a happy-go-lucky working-class boxer called Danny Cartwright. Cartwright is wrongfully imprisoned for the killing of his best friend and is sentenced to 22 years in the high-security Belmarsh prison, where he plots his revenge against the four men who framed him. But the four are all highly placed men of influence and wealth and Cartwright seems impotent to overturn this miscarriage of justice.

In prison, his cellmate Sir Nick Moncrieff becomes his educational mentor and tutor until he, too, is killed. However, here Archer’s story makes a leap of faith. Cartwright takes on the persona of the soon-to-be-released Moncrieff, is freed and then successfully uses Moncrieff’s considerable personal fortune to track down his four nemeses and put them in the dock, although a twist in the tale awaits.

Yet, is it really credible that a high-security prison would simply fail to notice the identity swap? We live, after all, in an age of DNA fingerprinting and biometrics. What about Moncrieff’s friends who welcome the fake Sir Nick on his release?

This quibble aside, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the novel is that his two main targets are the British class system and the legal and penal institutions, hardly the expected focus of criticism for a lifelong Conservative. Yet the former Tory MP Archer has been at pains to point out that his own incarceration led him to a greater understanding of social ills.

In Prisoner of Birth he has drawn heavily on his own life experiences, sentenced to four years for perjury, serving two, partly in Belmarsh.

The prison period, which covers about 100 pages of the plot, and the courtroom scenes are among the book’s strongest sections. Detailed and vivid, they are clearly sketched from his own painful personal acquaintance with crime and punishment.

Kenny Coyle