VOICE FROM DEVIL’S ISLAND

Press, 26 August 1978, Page 15

VOICE FROM DEVIL’S ISLAND

The Convict. By Felix Milani in collaboration with Micha Grin. Translated by Anita Barrows. Michael Joseph. 297 pp. $14.30. (Reviewed by Ralf Unger)

In a prison it is common practice for the more intelligent inmate to decide to write a book early on in his stay. He is then in a state of shock at what has befallen him and, in the experience of this reviewer, the book frequently starts with the variation of “a cell door clanged behind me and I knew I was alone.” The vast majority of these books never get past the first chapter, and only an infinitesimal percentage ever get to a publisher after the prisoner’s release. Milani. who tells this story to his ghost writer, did not even decide to write a book, but was persuaded to do so by the latter. The parallels to Henri Charriere’s “Papillon” are very obvious as they spent time in the same penal colony, French Guiana, and Milani refers to meeting Papillon on several occasions. We trace Milani’s career — a simple seaman who meets a prostitute who is maltreating her child. Milani is shocked by this. He stays with her and when the child dies is charged with homicide alongside her. Sentenced to the guillotine he is pardoned to life imprisonment and, in the process,

describes the repressive nature of French justice of the 1930 s which, according to him, fabricated evidence and was not interested in anything but a conviction. His only thought, from then on, was escape from the horrors of dungeons and from the “animalising” of justice's hapless victims.

The escapes through shark-infested waters, sucking quicksand, and constant bounty hunters looking for the rewards of capturing convicts end in continuing long periods of solitary confinement until eventually he is successful and returns to his home in Corsica. After three decades of imprisonment Milani is now an old man who, according to his editor, has some sort of natural nobility forged in the fires of France’s cages, now happly destroyed except as a macabre tourist attraction.

The book has appeal as a straightforward, unflourishing account of one man's life in prison, no doubt expanded by the adventures he heard from other inmates. Milani includes too much for one crowded life. For those still unfamiliar with, or wanting vicarious contact, with the foetid jungles and leper colonies that surrounded the living death of places such as Devil's Island, this is an undisturbing conducted tour.