The Lizard Cage
Novel, Random House Canada 2005
Winner of the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers
Shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize
Longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award
Also published in the U.S., Britain, Holland, France, Italy, Greece, Israel, Myanmar.
In her long-awaited first novel, Karen Connelly recreates the world of a Burmese prison cell, and of the country’s tumultuous years in the late 1980’s, when millions of people rose up to protest against the brutality of their military government. This is a story of human resilience, love and sly humour — a potent act of empathy and witness.
Inside his solitary confinement cell, Teza, who once electrified the people of Myanmar with his protest songs against the dictatorship, now applies his acute intelligence and Buddhist patience to finding meaning in the interminable days. Arrested by the Burmese secret police, cut off from his family for the first seven years of a twenty-year sentence, he searches for news and human connection in every object and being that is grudgingly allowed into his cell.
Despite his isolation, Teza has a profound influence on the people around him. His integrity and humour inspire the conscience-ridden senior jailer to radical change. His very existence challenges the brutal authority of the junior jailer, perversely nicknamed Handsome. Even though his server, the criminal Sein Yun, sees compromising Teza as his ticket out of jail, the singer befriends him, and falls into a trap of forbidden food, conversation, and the most dangerous contraband of all, pen and paper.
Lastly there’s Little Brother, an orphan who’s grown up inside the jail, imprisoned by his own deprivation. Teza and the boy are prisoners of different orders, but their extraordinary friendship frees both of them in utterly surprising ways. Overturning our expectations, Karen Connelly presents us with a world that celebrates human spirit, and spirit itself, in the midst of violence and injustice.
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REVIEWS
“I have never read anything like Karen Conelly’s The Lizard Cage. This book is a rare thing—passionate and lyrical at the same time and also a heart-stopping page-turner. Anyone moved by the monks’ protest in Burma will be blown away by the relationship at the heart of this book between Teza, a Buddhist monk and political prisoner, and a small boy who brings his food in the cage.”
— Jackie Kay, The Observer
“Jealousy and self-interest are pitched against justice and human decency as [protagonist] Teza unwittingly becomes the subject of a struggle between his allies and his enemies…an expertly constructed, often harrowing thriller.”
— Tash Aw, Guardian
“In this hymn to ‘raw paper’ and ink, language is endowed with the power and agency of a living creature…Connelly shows in unflinching detail how pain becomes a prison in itself…A chilling and powerful story.”
— Times Literary Supplement
“So consummate is Karen Connelly’s skill in The Lizard Cage that elements [of the life of a political prisoner in Burma] compel us to keep turning the pages. Her writing is muscular and taut, bringing inmates and warders fully alive. Impressive.”
— The New York Times
“In a feat of epic vision, Karen Connelly uses her every art to tell the urgent story of what The New York Times calls ‘Myanmar, arguably the most repressive regime in the world.’ The suspense never relents. Hope is small, but it lives, strengthened by this powerful book.”
— Maxine Hong Kingston
“A brutal exposé with harrowing descriptions of prison life and heavily spiritual overtones, Connelly's novel combines a thriller-like pace with finely etched portraits that show how each character takes control of his own freedom.”
— Publishers Weekly
“…among the saddest and most beautiful novels you might ever read…A plot summary does not convey the beauty and terror and nobility of Teza’s story, representative of so many others . . . Some books inspire us with the beauty of words and words’ rhythm. Some move us to action with their political observations. This book does that and more; it shows us how to be good.”
— The State
"In this novel, as in her previous books, there is a restless search for truth in a complex and sometimes tarnished world… Connelly reminds me of Latin American writers and poets like Pablo Neruda, who wrote so eloquently about the ills of their homelands. Like these writers, too, Connelly finds beauty and kindness and the potential for redemption in the most unexpected places . . .”
— The Globe and Mail
“A thoroughly absorbing, at times gripping story, which engages the reader’s emotions until the very end…Connelly does a brilliant job…Writing inside a foreign culture takes courage, and this is nothing if not a courageous book.”
— The Toronto Star
“There is something beautifully -- and surprisingly -- tender about Karen Connelly's debut novel, The Lizard Cage. Surprising because the novel concerns the brutal military dictatorship that seized power in Burma in 1988 and is still entrenchede…In The Lizard Cage, Connelly peels away much of the political rhetoric and gives us the human story, which is both fragile and resilient…not only heart-stirring but epic.”
— M.A.C. Farrant, The Vancouver Sun
“[A] deeply moving journey into the fraught terrain not only of Southeast Asia but also of the human mind…Connelly’s astonishing characters, her carefully-constructed plot, and her poetic language combine to produce a flawless, if heartbreaking, novel that is hard to put down and impossible to forget…As disturbing as much of the novel necessarily is, faith in humanity becomes its overarching message…”
— Canadian Literature
“[O]ne of her most fascinating achievements is the way she preserves Teza’s own beauty in the midst of the ugliness and brutality he finds himself in. We know he is regularly beaten, he suffers from rashes and bites, he is hardly ever allowed to wash, brush his teeth, change his clothes, and yet he remains beautiful. It is in this beauty that Connelly renders his humanity. Nothing can extinguish it…reminiscent of André Brink’s depiction of the dealings of the security police in A Dry White Season or Nadine Gordimer’s often quoted credo, “Nothing is as true as my fiction.”…Courageously, Connelly does not avert her eyes or her pen, and although by now she is denied entry in Burma, the many true stories she has captured in the fictional world of The Lizard Cage, which won the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for New Writers, are like the Songbird’s final “I will not”, or his song smuggled out of prison. A flicker of hope.”
— Sunday Independent (South Africa)