Book info

• Title The Penal Colony
• Author Richard Herley
• Year 1987
• Genre Thriller

The future. The British government now runs island prison colonies to take dangerous offenders from its overcrowded mainland jails. Among all these colonies, Sert, 25 miles off the north Cornish coast, has the worst reputation. There are no warders. Satellite technology is used to keep the convicts under watch. New arrivals are dumped by helicopter and must learn to survive as best they can. To Sert, one afternoon in July, is brought Anthony John Routledge, sentenced for a sex-murder he did not commit. Routledge knows he is here for ever. And he knows he must quickly forget the rules of civilized life. But not all the islanders are savages. Under the charismatic leadership of one man a community has evolved. A community with harsh and unyielding rules, peopled by resourceful men for whom the hopeless dream of escape may not be so hopeless after all...

Thoughts

A very interesting premise this. A future, not too far removed from our own, in which the worst of Britain’s prisoners are dumped on an island and essentially left to fend for themselves. With a minimum of input from the outside world, they fend and survive, with rival gangs, a dictatorship and plenty of internal politics.

This is a story of survival, of how mankind can be both at its worst and its best without the structures of civilisation, and it’s laid over a tale of wrongful imprisonment, adjusting to island life and attempts to escape.

I enjoyed the book, it was quite a page-turner in places, although the pacing was a bit odd. Some of the timescales didn’t quite fit in my head, and the passing longer periods of time didn’t flow as well as in other books. But that’s a minor complaint for what was a fascinating read.

Rating: 4 / 5