The Lizard Cage

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By Karen Connelly ISBN: 9780679313281 format: Paperback pages: 448 publisher: Random House of Canada pub. date: 2007-03-06

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In The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly, two brothers fight for a woman named Aung San Suu Kyi, one using words and the other using weapons.

Aung San Suu Kyi believes that Burma must return to a political democracy. While his brother fights for freedom as part of a group of guerrillas, it is Teza, the guitar-playing songwriter, whose words inspire revolution. He is eventually imprisoned and tortured. Teza escapes the cage of his solitary confinement through meditation and hope; the cage that traps the spirits of his jailers proves much more difficult to break.

Burma (formerly and still legally Myanmar) comes vividly to life in this story of anger, cruelty and betrayal.

(Joan)

Winner of the 2007 Orange Award for New Writers..

Set during Burma's military dictatorship of the mid—1990s, Karen Connelly’s exquisitely written and harshly realistic debut novel is a hymn to human resilience and love.

In the sealed-off world of a vast Burmese prison known as the cage, Teza languishes in solitary confinement seven years into a twenty-year sentence. Arrested in 1988 for his involvement in mass protests, he is the nation’s most celebrated songwriter whose resonant words and powerful voice pose an ongoing threat to the state. Forced to catch lizards to supplement his meager rations, Teza finds emotional and spiritual sustenance through memories and Buddhist meditation. The tiniest creatures and things–a burrowing ant, a copper-coloured spider, a fragment of newspaper within a cheroot filter–help to connect him to life beyond the prison walls.

Even in isolation, Teza has a profound influence on the people around him. His integrity and humour inspire Chit Naing, the senior jailer, to find the courage to follow his conscience despite the serious risks involved, while Teza’s very existence challenges the brutal authority of the junior jailer, perversely nicknamed Handsome. Sein Yun, a gem smuggler and prison fixer, is his most steady human contact, who finds delight in taking advantage of Teza by cleverly tempting him into Handsome's web with the most dangerous contraband of all: pen and paper.

Lastly, there's Little Brother, an orphan raised in the jail, imprisoned by his own deprivation. Making his home in a tiny, corrugated-metal shack, Little Brother stays alive by killing rats and selling them to the inmates. As the political prisoner and the young boy forge a cautious friendship, we learn that both are prisoners of different orders; only one of them dreams of escape and only one of them achieves it.

Barely able to speak, losing the battle of the flesh but winning the battle of the spirit, Teza knows he has the power to transfigure one small life, and to send a message of hope and resistance out of the cage.

Shortlisted for both the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, The Lizard Cage has received rave reviews nationally and internationally.

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