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The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly

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Reviewed by Victoria Hoyle, at Eve's Alexandria

The scene is set in Burma. It is 1995 and as the novel opens Ko Teza, a songwriter and political activist, has been in prison for seven years with (at least) thirteen more to serve. He has spent all of that time - 364 weeks, 2556 days - in solitary confinement, visited only by his jailers and another prisoner who brings his food. No books, no newspapers, no writing materials, no music, nothing at all to relieve the tedium. He receives occasional parcels of food from his mother - filched of most of their contents - but he hasn't seen or spoken to her since the day he was arrested. In order to keep up his physical strength he kills and eats raw lizards. He endures frequent and arbitrary violence, but much worse is the cultural and sensual wasteland of his bare cell. His crime? He once wrote an extremely popular song critical of Burma’s ruling 'party'. In prison he is known simply as The Songbird. Into this barren tedium stumbles a nameless twelve year old boy, who catches and kills rats in return for his upkeep in the prison. Uneducated, unloved and forgotten by society, he is as much a prisoner as Ko Teza. The Lizard Cage is the story of their mutual liberation from the narrowest of worlds through the power of words: spoken, written and sung.

It is an extraordinary novel which failed to receive the popular success it deserved on release, despite winning the Orange Prize for New Writers in 2007. It is the real sadness of the story, and the ubiquity of it, that drives Connelly's prose, which is both elegiac and epic in cadence. Because of this it ultimatelytranscends propaganda and avoids didactism. It is never a single-issue, thinly-veiled morality tale. Rather it is a full-bodied, unrestricted meditation on freedom of speech, tyranny and humanity. It is a book to feel strongly about - politically, emotionally, and intellectually. It is the kind of book that turns people’s minds to confront injustice and, in doing so, strikes against corruption, exploitation and torture. There is no doubt, no doubt at all in my mind that it is one of the unsung literary masterpieces of the Noughties.

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