Amoebic dysentery, maggots, sadistic guards, a reeking latrine pail— these are the constants in Karen Connelly’s tale of political prisoners in Burma, a novel that, at least initially, makes you wonder who will read on, through scenes featuring little more than truncheons and gruel, to puzzle over the unexpected, alien detail— a white pen— at the centre of the plot.

And who will care about the novel’s main characters, a 12-year-old orphan who kills rats for a living and a skeletal dissident in solitary confinement, reduced to eating the lizards he traps inside his cell?

Yet so consummate is Connelly’s skill in The Lizard Cage that such elements compel us to keep turning the pages. Although this is the award-winning Canadian poet and travel writer’s first novel, her writing is muscular and taut, bringing inmates and warders fully alive. Still more impressive, she avoids anything so trite as an affirmation of the human spirit in the face of injustice.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn asked: “Can you behead a man whose head has already been cut off? You can. Can you skin the hide off a man when he has already been skinned? You can! This was all invented in our camps.” A similar absurdity infuses Connelly’s story. She seems to have learned it from the great masters of the literature of political incarceration.

Like China’s Wei Jingsheng, a democracy activist jailed for nearly two decades whose prison letters were published as The Courage to Stand Alone, she knows that even a tenuous bond with another living creature can bolster the soul. Wei raised rabbits. Connelly’s prisoner studies ants.

Even more crucial, Connelly realises— as Nelson Mandela explained in Long Walk to Freedom, an account of his 27 years of detention in South Africa— that “the most important person in any prisoner’s life is not the minister of justice, not the commissioner of prisons, not even the head of the prison, but the warder in one’s section.”

Jail cell intrigue

Connelly’s prisoner has two warders. The man known as ‘Handsome’ plants the white pen, the most serious form of contraband, on his charge. Handsome then uses this as an excuse to beat the prisoner. The second warder, a senior jailer, takes a very different tack, ordering that the prisoner be given morphine and bringing him precious food. It is he who, in the end, understands the significance of the white pen.

Unlike Wei or Mandela, who wrote for a public that had enshrined them as heroic figures, Connelly’s fictional character has no constituency, no reputation to uphold. Through him, she shows us what autobiography usually veils: the human spirit not at its most defiant and brave, but as it really is.



Power of the ‘word’

The brutal force of incarceration dominates and corrodes everything for a political prisoner, so the written word, comparatively immaterial, acquires added power. Newspapers, Mandela observed, were “the most precious contraband on Robben Island. News was the intellectual raw material of the struggle.” He and his fellow inmates scrambled to retrieve bits of newspaper that had held the warders’ sandwiches. In Connelly’s novel, the equivalent is the Burmese cheroot, whose filters are wrapped in newsprint. Carefully unraveling them, the prisoner reads the fragmented poetry of the outside world: “loved / despite everything / rain / understood.”
Orwell’s essay ‘A Hanging’ forcefully contemplates the subject of oppression, rather than its instrument. In it, he recalled watching as a prisoner stepped aside to avoid a puddle on the walk to the gallows. “Till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man,” Orwell wrote. “When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive.”
Connelly’s novel accomplishes something Orwell never managed: it gets inside the head of that ‘conscious man.’ Her prisoner’s innermost self is laid bare in the pages of The Lizard Cage— even his most unbecoming moments. Unlike Wei or Mandela, who wrote for a public that had enshrined them as heroic figures, Connelly’s fictional character has no constituency, no reputation to uphold. Through him, she shows us what autobiography usually veils: the human spirit not at its most defiant and brave, but as it really is and can only be.
The New York Times

THE LIZARD CAGE
By Karen Connelly.
431 pp. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $26