No escape from jail memoirs

Westerners’ books about doing time in Thai prisons interest me as much as TV documentaries by “adventurers” on how much they suffered while climbing a mountain. In both cases we’re talking about self-inflicted wounds, so why should I care?

But Thai bookstores shelves are piled high with foreigners’ advice on what sights to see, which bargirls to avoid and how to survive a decade or two in Klong Prem Prison, so someone must be reading this stuff – and over and over, because the stories are always the same. (The term “living vicariously” springs to mind.)

In “Bangkok Hard Time”, American Jon Cole throws in a curve by claiming that Australian Warren Fellows was exaggerating in his 1997 book “The Damage Done” about having to eat bugs at Klong Prem. According to Coles, who was there for a few years in the 1980s, the place isn’t so bad. 

In fact, the “senior” American prisoner owned his own “house” in “The Garden” within the compound and, on his release, bequeathed the building to Coles. 

They had heroin and ganja. Over in the Thai section, VIP inmates had booze on the weekends, served by kathoey inmates wearing sarongs. 

Western prisoners were never beaten, again contrary to what Fellows wrote, although, to be fair, Fellows spent most of his time at Bang Kwang, a decade earlier, so maybe Coles was simply witnessing progress.

I still don’t care. “Bangkok Hard Time” isn’t completely boring, but the trite, cliché-choked content (“Don’t do what I did, kids”) is served as plain as the rice soup at the jail. 

For something meatier and more fulfilling, and for a lesson in how Bangkok Hilton books ought to be done if writers simply cannot restrain themselves, there’s “Escape: The Past”. David McMillan packs more pages with far better writing simply to explain what happened in the years leading up to his slammer time, already recounted in “Escape”.

That 2008 book was widely and admiringly reviewed as “the true story of the only Westerner ever to break out of Thailand’s Bangkok Hilton”. 

By way of explaining that he was once a good boy, career criminal McMillan (aka “McVillain”, another Australian) claims he read a lot of books when he was young, and it shows in his clever writing. There are hooks at the beginning and end of every chapter that fasten the reader to the story like Velcro.

Coles timidly offers a cautionary tale about drugs. McMillan’s brash cautions are about how to avoid capture. Coles lumbers through Bangkok. McMillan darts about the world. But you know what? That’s right – I still don’t care. Regardless of how highly McMillan was once rated by Interpol, he’s just another pusher who got rich. In that bruised and perforated vein, Pablo Escobar’s story is far more intriguing, and so are hundreds of other crime books that don’t involve anything as mundane as dope deals.

FARANG INTEREST QUOTIENT : Expatriates in Thailand who like to say “Hey, I know that place” will find more in Coles’ “Hard Time” than in McMillan’s globetrotting “prequel”. 

Coles, from Arkansas, attended International School Bangkok in the late 1960s. 

He smoked a joint on the roof of the Grace Hotel and frequented Thermae and nightclubs on Petchburi Road, but his chief hangout was what he calls “Bahn Pee Lek”. 

This long-gone shanty on Sukhumvit Soi 18 was where his Thai drug source lived and it takes on epic dimensions in the retelling of the tale. 

While the covers of their books burble about “the Bangkok Hilton”, neither of these writers can be accused of overusing the term. The name was lifted from the title of a 1989 Australian TV mini-series starring Nicole Kidman and based in turn on “the Hanoi Hilton”, the Vietnam War PoW jail. 

By now in the popular imagination, the Bangkok Hilton could be either Bang Kwang or Klong Prem, or anywhere else with iron bars in the windows.