The Lizard Cage

I am eating an egg. He revises it.
I am eating my whole life.
Rain begins to fall, all at once, steadily, a wet broom sweeping out the sky. Fresh air billows into the cell. The rain has a mantra: egg, egg, egg, egg, egg.
With a fleck of yellow yolk stuck on his lower lip, Teza makes up a stupid joke.
What comes first, the chicken or the egg?
The political prisoner, of course.
He swallows as slowly as it's possible to swallow without choking. He revises it.
What comes first, the chicken or the egg?
The boy. Free El Salvador, who brought the political prisoner an egg from a bowl of mohinga.

The Lizard Cage was published in 2007, at a time when Burmese prisons were still full of political prisoners; mostly demonstrating students rounded up in a 1988 crackdown by the country's ruling generals (as mentioned in the book, it was these generals who changed the country's name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989, and even though some democratic reforms have taken place since 2011, it's still unclear whether it is considered "correct" for English speakers to acknowledge the name change; to acknowledge the authority of the generals' dictatorship). Since the famous dissident Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in 2010, there have been waves of amnesty for the other political prisoners, but this was a future hardly dreamed of in the bleak and brutal world captured in The Lizard Cage by author Karen Connelly (a Canadian who travelled extensively within Burma and based her novel on interviews and eyewitness accounts).

This is the story of -- primarily -- two characters: Teza, a protest singer who is in year seven of a twenty year prison sentence, currently held in solitary confinement, whose sanity relies on meditation and his communion with the ants, lizards, and a copper-coloured spider that visit his "teak coffin"; and a twelve-year-old orphan (known by various nicknames) who makes his home in the prison, performing errands for the right to live in a crude shack and hunt the rats that he trades to the prisoners for rice and other treasures. When their paths eventually cross, these two characters change each other's lives forever. Prison life is as horrible as the phrase "Burmese prison" might conjure -- with corrupt and sadistic warders, small amounts of barely edible food, sleeping on a concrete floor with a thin cover and bedbugs, brutal beatings, and sexual bullying -- but Teza and "Free El Salvador" both find ways to escape through the written word: Teza, by unwrapping scraps of newsprint from the filters of the cheroots he is allowed to smoke (which he ceremonially assembles into modernist poetry of a sort -- siblings existed remained boy flawlessly/loved despite everything rain understood -- before destroying the evidence of his contraband words); and the orphan, by examining the paperbacks he has collected, hoping to discover the key word that will unravel the mystery of reading for him. Just as Teza's songs have survived his imprisonment, both of these characters know that one white pen -- and the stories it might capture -- can be the most dangerous weapon within the prison walls.

As long as there is paper, people will write, secretly, in small rooms, in the hidden chambers of their minds, just as people whisper the words they're forbidden to speak aloud.

Between the prison scenes and Teza's memories of a Burma before the dictatorship, Connelly revealed a world to me that I hadn't given much thought to before. For this reason, The Lizard Cage is a very interesting novel and, since it was written during the height of the regime's power and brutality, it's a very important story to have captured. The scenes of beatings and sadistic characters wielding their authority were written powerfully, and it's easy to have one's emotions manipulated by a poorly-treated orphan, yet overall, I didn't find this to be a powerful novel, and it's hard for me to pin down what's missing. Like with books about the Holocaust or memoirs of childhood abuse, I often want to rate books higher just because I sympathise with the subject matter, but I can't deny that there was something imperfectly accomplished about The Lizard Cage, while admitting that I am happy to have read it. 

One small complaint: this book has quite a few photographs throughout it (pictures taken by the author over her years in Burma), and as this isn't something I've ever seen in a novel before, I found them a bit distracting; like I wasn't trusted to imagine a young Buddhist monk or a man in shackles. One picture of a table with an overturned stool is opposite a page where the orphan sees an overturned stool and spits at it and I had to wonder, "Did that picture come first and the author needed to work in the image? That image?" In another section, a very powerful inmate is described and it's explained that his nickname "the Tiger" comes from his many tiger tattoos. On the next page, there is a photo of a spindly man's legs, complete with amateurish tigers prowling their lengths -- and again, "Did that picture come first and inspire the character? Why doesn't it jibe with the mental image I was just given?" It was a strange (and distracting) editorial choice.

Bottom line: I am happy to have read The Lizard Cage and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in a peek into a Burmese prison during the years it was a pariah state.

Okay, I know that in my review for The End Of Your Life Book Club I said that the book discussions didn't "particularly convince me to read what they were reading", and that was primarily based on the perfunctory discussions that Will Schwalbe and his mother made about the books that I had read before. For some reason, I thought they made The Lizard Cage sound more intriguing than it is, but I guess that's because they were able to tie it to the importance of storytelling (pretty much the point of their book club) and Mary Anne's professional involvement with human rights. For these reasons, this might have been a more meaningful read to them, and again, I feel wary about following any more of their recommendations.