The Lizard Cage

"Yes, I think she spent time on the Thai-Burmese border where all the refugees are based. It’s actually a jolly harrowing book, a bit of a whodunnit. The Lizard Cage is a prison about 100 miles from Rangoon and the Burmese equivalent of a gulag, with political prisoners, gangster prisoners, and the most reviled are the political prisoners in solitary. The book is about this man known as the songbird, who was supposed to be a doctor and got muddled up in the Aung San Suu Kyi pre-NLD elections in 1988, and was put in solitary in this appalling cell. He meditates in his cell and doesn’t talk to anybody but the lizards and the ants to stop himself going mad. Every week he goes to have a shower and the shower room is dark and full of rats that you have to get rid of, and it’s really ghastly, but it lifts the veil on conditions in Burmese prisons. There’s this appallingly brutal jailer who beats him, and won’t let him wash and he gets these suppurating sores and he knows if he doesn’t wash them he’ll get amoebic dysentery. No, but it’s based on millions of real characters in Burma now. In fact it could be that one, the Burmese comedian, who was sent to prison for telling jokes about five years ago."