Warren Fellows

I am a fairly slow reader at times unless its very quiet at work and I get a few hours to myself. When I'm at home I tend to read in short stints rather than big sessions. Time with this book however was very different. I started it one evening and didnt go to bed until I had finished it, I just couldnt put it down and for me thats a rare thing.

Unlike some books I've read in the past on westerners in foreign jails, from the start Fellows states his guilt. Sometimes you tend to feel that when people do this they are somewhat proud of what they have done, not Fellows. Some stories of captivity in foreign jails tell of bad times but are inter-twined with the parties they have and the ease of getting things should you have the money. In Fellows' book there are drugs and plenty of them but at no point there is the glamourisation that sometimes occurs.

Everything is nasty, brutally violent and unrelenting. There is no break in the pace of for lighter moments and I really felt the relief he felt at the end of him time prison. Tellingly there is a large section dedicated to the time after his release and how hard he found it trying to adjust to 'normal' life again. I really got a feel of the physical prison being played out for eternity afterwards mentally.

His way of laying everything out on the table throws up some thoughts with me. He is guilty, of that there is no doubt so does he deserve what he got. He deserved to be locked up, of that there is no doubt but having no human rights is undeserved by anyone today. Its certainly a very stark contrast when compared with the sentence and punishment he would have received in the UK for example.… (mais)

This was horrifying. I've read a number of disturbing books over the years, from histories on the Holocaust through memoirs from Japanese PoW camps in World War Two to novels in which violence, rape and sickening depravities have a prominent role. But nothing I've read has been so consistently shocking as The Damage Done.

Words like 'horrifying' don't really do it justice; you have to read it to know what I mean. Just when you think you're getting to grips with some of the nightmarish stuff which is happening (and this is a true story, remember), Fellows somehow manages to introduce another episode in which something even more appalling happens. At times I just wanted to fling the book from my hands as I was creeped out again and again. The cockroach bit on page 71 in particular did for me, but this was far from an isolated occurrence. It is relentless; just about every page has one of these episodes, and your soul dies a little inside with every page turn. Overall, the book is a graphic chronicle of every conceivable form of mental and physical stress, of every method of violence and torture, with just enough fragments of hope and humanity to throw the brutality and depravity into even sharper relief.

Fellows writes with a blunt and disarming honesty which spares the reader nothing. But The Damage Done is not some sort of voyeuristic thrill; Fellows is very perceptive and engaging, and talks eloquently about how one is sucked into a life of crime, how one learns to live in such unspeakably horrible environments as the Thai dungeons and how one tries to reacclimatise to normal life upon release. He freely admits his guilt and is not looking for pity, or trying to push a philosophy that you can survive anything by turning to Jesus or somesuch nonsense. At times I thought he might be embellishing some occurrences (it wouldn't be the first time in books of this sort, particularly as tall tales would be hard to disprove) but his reluctance to talk about some factors which on a cynical level would have enhanced the story (for example, his wife and son, or why he hated the Old Man so much) suggest to me that this really is a man laying his soul bare - an exorcism of sorts, with no embellishments necessary.

It's hard to enthuse about a book of this type, and to say that one 'enjoyed' it or thought it was 'fantastic' seems inappropriate, and only serves to show how words can be feeble things sometimes. If the measure of a great book is in the strength of its impact on the reader, then The Damage Done is a great book. It will deeply disturb anyone who reads it. It is certainly not for the faint-of-heart, and I would suggest that even those of a strong constitution should seriously think twice.… (mais)