Klong Prem prison, Thailand: the Bangkok Hilton, where 600 foreigners among the 12,000 inmates of this walled prison city also wait and rot. Among the tragic, ruthless and forgotten, one man resolves to do what no other has done: escape. This is the true story of Australian drug smuggler David McMillan's perilous break-out from Asia's most notorious prison.
From his arrest at Don Muang airport, to awaiting trial inside Klong Prem, he provides an insight into the lives of the Australian, American, British and other Western prisoners as they are destroyed by disease, neglect and despair. Death is their only way out.
Two weeks before a near-certain death sentence McMillan escaped, never to be seen in Thailand again.
Utterly Engrossing Escape
Thailand's Klong Prem prison has become a synonym for Asian hell-holes, a reputation not reduced by the large numbers of jail tourists who schedule a visit in their itineraries to their imprisoned countrymen and women between shopping at the floating market and swilling Singha beer in a Patpong girlie bar.
David McMillan was held in the Bangkok Hilton' awaiting trial on drug charges in the mid- 90s for almost two years. If his trial had ended the way most local trials do, he might still be there today, for sentences range between thirty and ninety-nine years. Before his trial ended, McMillan escaped, becoming the first Westerner to successfully break out of Klong Prem, a feat no one has yet repeated.
ESCAPE is not the usual, crying my-life-in-hell story. Firstly, the author makes no excuses for his life as a drug smuggler. Emotional responses to the good, the bad and the ugly in the 12,000-strong prison complex are reported through the reactions of the fifty or more fellow inmates who McMillan describes as he relentlessly pursues his search for the perfect escape plan.
Secondly, the circumstances of how McMillan came to be arrested in China town and why so many agencies are set against him are revealed in the style of a thriller. Despite the author appearing often cold and ruthless, this reader could not help being alongside him as both accomplices and plans fall away.
Supporting characters are surprisingly varied for the closed environment: not only Eddie the junkie-courier from Switzerland, Chang the Taiwanese cook, Kelvin the sorrowful Hawaiian arrested with his Californian girlfriend, Rick the conniving English bar owner, but also Germans pretending to be barons, Nigerians actually princes, young clubbers, jaded Americans, mysterious Chinese and a mad anarchist-scientist serving fifty years' for being the translator on a Canadian drug deal. As well, a motley collection of languishing Australians, surreally presented at a real embassy Christmas party inside the prison grounds.
Throughout escape plans A-to-Z (including one, a comic attempt to brazen through the corridors dressed as UN medics pretending to evacuate prisoners during an epidemic), McMillan is supported or hindered by those closest to him, including his girlfriend, a part-time jazz singer from New Zealand.
Despite the hard-boiled waterfront-reporter voice of the author, I couldn't help wondering if the true McMillan began as one of the near-suicides in the remand section, quickly passed aside in the early chapters, before changing into the one who got away. The copy I read was published in Singapore where the death penalty still applies; appropriate for a book that never laments, apologises or preaches, yet tells more in fewer words about people facing death or oblivion than books twice as thick.
I've read that this book is soon to be filmed - I hope so - it seems the perfect material.
Guest, 04/11/2009
