The Glass Cage

The second volume of memoir by John Healy, published thirty-seven years after his first: the ‘savage masterpiece’ that was The Glass Arena.

With imaginative prose and startling imagery, Healy takes us on a journey where he first works in a late-night cafe serving whores, pimps, druggies, window-ledgers, handbag snatchers, narks, pervs, ponces, halfwits, old shoulder rollers, broken-down bouncers and the odd psychopath. Situated at the dim end of the counter at the furthest corner from God’s light on earth, he plans his escape and ends up in a world more treacherous and dangerous than he could ever have imagined. In this world of middle-class literature, living hand to mouth, he writes The Grass Arena and is suddenly propelled into a place far superior to his own: a place he both desired and feared.

To become suddenly famous in an unfamiliar world of power and privilege was completely disorienting. He finds himself thrown into unpredictable situations that call for a tact where he was more used to situations where people achieved their aims through superior brutality.

The Glass Cage is an unrepentant account of a life few of us could imagine. A worthy sequel to The Grass Arena, it is John Healy’s crowning achievement.