On The Brinks

By AM Wednesday, November 2, 2011

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It is not often that a reader is fortunate enough to strike gold and come across a gem of this quality. Like a perfectly brewed cup of tea, the event is a rare one, to be all the more savoured for that. If the moment is missed, the elements move out of kilter. And the spot, well it just doesn’t get hit.

On The Brinks is one that reviewers sometimes take to awkwardly describing as unputdownable.  That rings as gawkily as unletgoable. There is nothing clumsy about On The Brinks and a term like ‘stunning’ better fits the elegance with which Sam Millar conveys his story.  If the book being translated into ten different languages elicits surprise it would be a feign one.

Once, when a friend asked me for something as a quick read I gave him On The Brinks. He returned it so speedily I thought he might not have read it. His response was terse; he had been bowled over by the sheer pace of it and had to go through it in one sitting.

Sam Millar, a former republican prisoner, might at first glance strike a reader in search of a good book an unlikely author. He did not feature in the H-Block literary landscape, from which a motley crew of writers emerged and subsequently went on to shape much of the wider republican narrative. Although an early PRO for the prisoners during the prison blanket protest, seriously creative writing for him began much later in a cell in a US penitentiary. Just as a book should never be judged by the cover a writer is not to be judged by presumption.

Led Zeppelin founder Jimmy Plant on discovering Robert Plant singing thought there might be something wrong with the vocalist. Plant was so talented that Page simply could not understand why he had not been signed up by a record company already so took him up to his house for a few weeks where he could observe him at close quarters.  As it turned out there was nothing wrong with Plant. He had just not yet come to public attention. His talent as a front man would soon come to dominate the rock scene of the 70s. Likewise with Miller. This former republican prisoner came up on the outside track unnoticed, eventually leaving his literati comrades watching the dust kicked up by his heels.

The prison writing scene was undoubtedly denied something by this talent not being in full throttle within the walls. Clearly this was a flower not yet ready to bloom. The prison produced some accomplished writers, Laurence McKeown and Richard O’Rawe being two of the better known. What Miller, who has never sought to cast off his prison tag, has managed is that whereas the others are generally known both as ex-prisoners who are writers he appears to have made it as a writer pure and simple. If there is such a thing as a natural born writer it is to be found in the person of Sam Miller. The words flow from his pen as sweet as the juice from a ripened fruit bursting.

Many years ago I read Jimmy Boyle’s great prison memoir, A Sense of Freedom.  Boyle, literally confined in a cage, had battled the brutal Scottish prison system for years on end. Once the era of intense prison conflict covered in the book had passed and moved onto Boyle being a sculptor-prisoner, he seemed to take his foot off the pedal. The energy of raw prison violence and conflict that so powered much of his memoir dissipated and the creativity that was its property frittered away. Miller never made that error; the tempo held throughout.

On The Brinks, because of the expanse it covers, is a narrative which has necessary joints. They are anything but awkward.  Taking fictional licence it is best described as a book of three halves! And I remain hard pressed to plump for one over any other. Sam Miller’s days in the H Blocks were riveting but they were matched both by his formative years and his time in New York, the scene of the robbery that would eventually see him on his way back to Ireland. 

The writing glides effortlessly from one situation to another and the story loses nothing in charting the changes. His early life prior to going to jail is fascinating for his story telling ability alone. He reflects with self awareness rather than self pity a challenging childhood in North Belfast. He was son to a despair afflicted mother who parted with his father when Millar was eleven. One failed suicide attempt prompted him to comment that his mother had ‘survived to die another day.’ He learned of that day during the blanket protest. But the news was ‘inconsequential’ as the imperative of survival demanded all his energy and attention.

In the rag store of his early years Sadie, the de facto boss running the operation on the ground, had been bitten so many times by rats that she seemed immune to them. On Friday afternoons, once the customary bottle of Mundies, a fortified South African wine much loved by Belfast tipplers, had been downed Sadie would down her knickers, displaying the war wounds on her back side to anyone inclined to pay attention. When Millar found a job in the abattoir he could bring home as much meat on ‘Fishy Friday’ as he wished, venting his contempt for Catholic tradition which viewed the eating of meat on Fridays as somehow sinful.

Fridays also played their part in allowing the reader to meet another character from this story, who despite only a cameo role was none the less memorable for that. Outside Peter Kelly’s chipper on a Friday evening the author as a boy would bump into the Lone Ranger with his invisible horse and gun. Much like a decommissioned IRA the Lone Ranger rode around in a make believe world, slapping his rear end, telling Silver to ‘giddy up’. The audience laughed rather than listened.

Tormented by screws during the blanket protest he developed a visceral hatred of the species; a breed apart as former blanket man Jake Jackson was fond of terming them. During the 1983 escape from the H-Blocks Millar saw the screws tied up and unable to wield their abusive power:

I couldn’t resist the urge to look in at the screws who were tied and stripped to their underwear, huddled together, fearful for their lives. Our fear had lasted years. Theirs only minutes. I felt cheated that their punishment should be so light and wanted to rectify it. I could so easily have set fire to the room and let God deal with it. The innocent would survive while the guilty perished.

All who underwent the blanket protest have at some time shared the feeling.

Millar pulls together something of what things were like during the early days of the blanket protest where incommunicado smothered news of the plight of republican prisoners and knowledge of it is largely word of mouth. It was an experience he shared with the other dogged pioneers of the jail struggle, some of whom are now dead.  Between them they dug in on the rocky ground of political resistance to British labelling strategies and refused to take one step back, holding the position until reinforcements arrived in the form of more imprisoned comrades. It was an unremitting struggle of human endurance against the grinding prison machine, in which the battle hardened blanket men prevailed over a bestial brutality.

After release Millar eventually made his way to New York, where his tales of casino life are humorous and insightful. There he worked with a strange crew including the untrustworthy bouncer Ronnie, rarely without a book by, or quote from, Marcus Aurelius.

The finale comes in the form of the robbery of the Brink’s Depot in Rochester, New York. If Millar and his crew could succeed in laughing all the way to the Brinks they would avoid penury. If not, the penitentiary would not avoid them. While they managed to pull off the audacious heist they were eventually apprehended. Once again the author found himself on the wrong side of a prison wall.

Perhaps only for that robbery the literary scene would itself have been robbed of a truly great writer whose ability as a story teller has surely made its mark.

Sam Millar, On The Brinks, 2003.  Wynkin deWorde: Galway