BOOK REVIEW

Go Boy! – Roger Caron

Through the eyes of one of Canada’s most intense criminals, notorious for his escape record

       I came to learn of Roger Caron on a casual car ride to Kingston, during which my mother and I were leisurely wandering through her memory in no particular direction. A focus of a senior-year radio project when she was in journalism school, my mother described Caron as one of Canada’s greatest fugitives, a token of recidivism who – by the age of 40 no less – had spent over half his life in and out of prisons for thievery and boasted a notorious reputation for escape. After much searching online, I was finally able to order a reasonably priced copy of his book from a second-hand store in the U.S., perplexed that it was so difficult to track down. Published in 1978, the memoir was actually the recipient of that year’s Governor General’s award for its honest insight into the often unforgiving operation of Canada’s prison system.

       From a young age Caron was a born troublemaker, looking to provoke outrage and shock with his impish ways. He was first sent to prison at 16 for breaking and entering, and within days got into his first fight with an inmate twice his size, ultimately knocking him out by smashing a hockey stick over his head. He immediately fled to avoid punishment, hopping a fence and scurrying away into the night only to be captured at a restaurant three days later.

          The whole book reads as a chronicle of similar incidents, all told at head-spinning pace. Caron’s ingenuity saw him repeatedly escape his cell block in unimaginable ways, while his dangerously short temper manifested itself in countless fights. He recalls his fists “would act like demented playmates with a mind and temper of their own. It was as though all the hate and frustration of being a born loser had been seeped into them.” The book also serves as commentary on the prison system, in which guards physically and mentally abused the prisoners with a heartless exhibition of schadenfreude. Caron was subject to corporal punishment, which he portrays as an excruciating pain that lived with him for weeks physically and for years mentally. In another instance, he was offered punitive relief from a period of solitary confinement by agreeing to be a guinea pig for a medical treatment being developed by one of the prison doctors. Strapped into a strait jacket and made to breathe a noxious gas, Caron suffered a severe convulsion and yet was made to undergo the treatment six more times before the medical staff discontinued the research entirely.

      The book is far from a literary exemplar, for Caron’s writing is plain and devoid of much emotional thrust. I was waiting for a passage of self-reflection or introspective psychoanalysis that simply never came: the most Caron offers the reader is a short expression of remorse for regressing to jungle law upon succumbing to his anger, either by ripping apart his jail cells or picking fights with guards or prisoners. Despite his blatantly bellicose manner, I couldn’t help but admire Caron for his rugged tenacity and intense determination to not demonstrate weakness – even when faced with the paddle or a gang of rough inmates he refused to call for help or plea for mercy.

      On finishing the book, two key questions remained in my mind. The first was whether the Canadian prison system, depicted as a vile institution run by heartless sadists, has improved in the last half-century. The second and more unanswerable, was how much Caron’s life roadmap was impacted by his treatment during incarceration versus his natural temperament and proclivity for violence. Sadly, even after he earned parole for the success of his book, he continued to live a life of erratic crime throughout the 1990s, before his death as a free man in 2012. Gone but not forgotten, he lives on as a symbol of the indefatigable criminal whose emotions and pride were simply too much for him to control. 

-NP, March 2016