It’s written with pens rationed by burly jailers, made up of words hidden in envelopes stuffed into black bags with chops of approval from a Korean prison and filled with experiences of convicted criminals. Cullen Thomas’s 1st book, Brother One Cell, recounts his 4 years in Korea’s prisons.

As a restless young man in his raring 20s, he leaves America for exotic South Korea on a teaching job. He meets a nubile young girl by the slightly bizarre name of Rocket and they both travel to the even more exotic Philippines in search of adventure.

Met with the lure of a thrill and insane profit, Thomas smuggles hashish, against Rocket’s and his better judgment, into the conservative Korea. Of course he’s caught and useless lawyers and wily prosecutors have him thrown into jail and he lives out his 20s while straddling the prisons in Taejon and Uijongbu.

The furore that adds a bit of spice is that the U.S. Embassy in Korea advises Thomas that the possession of hashish in the United States of America is not as big a deal as it is in South Korea. So the prosecutors look like domineering dictators who forced Thomas to settle into the judicial system of a country whose language he doesn’t even speak.

Thomas grows up in prison, making the transition from irrational, cussing boy to restrained, empathetic man. He does this in the gradual and subtle way that can only be achieved in a biography.

The Hard Part

Unlike Henri Charrière in Papillon, Thomas was imprisoned for a crime he did commit. Besides, he attempted no brave escapes and since there’s also so much you can talk about having to adapt to an oppressive foreign culture, his story is hardly exciting and didn’t seem to justify the 400-odd pages.

Thomas also enjoys painting repulsive and vividly gruesome pictures about his stay in the prisons. He describes Korea as a tumour and highlights the pain from his boils and the stench from his wild “crotch hair” that “permeates the air and hangs” all too enthusiastically. His too pellucid descriptions of opened toilets and growing infections, while necessary when emphasising the grime and squalor of the tiny cells, makes the book disgustingly graphic and a little difficult to stomach.

The Ups

But all is not lost since readers live vicariously, like To-ma-suh (Thomas in a thick Korean accent), through the colourful lives of his prison mates, caring Billy, notorious Tracey, stubborn Costello and certain gang leaders.

These characters seem dodgy. After all, they are convicted criminals but the men are hardly nefarious. They’re as kind as they can be, initiating the young To-ma-suh into the nationalistic, Confucian culture that invades the fortified walls of the prisons.

These characters made Brother One Cell so much more intriguing.

Also, Thomas is delightfully well-read. He quotes T.E. Lawrence, Graham Greene and Shakespeare at the start of some chapters and the paragraphs were suitable humdingers to the gloomy events that followed.

Besides being quite the bookworm, devouring Tolstoy and Thoreau during his sentence and quoting dead writers often, Thomas was also striking in his knowledge of the Korean prison and political system and was able to discuss, quite thoroughly, the adherence to Confucian beliefs even in politics and the tension between the 2 Koreas and its rulers.

Just as Thomas weaves his knowledge of the system into the book, he threads his stay in prison with flashbacks of his childhood. It may have seemed that he was much too fond of them, sprinkling the book with whole chapters of flashbacks, but they became necessary because they told of his love for Tintin and his longing for family trips, making him more human and developing his character a tad more.

Brother One Cell is a difficult book to plough through but hanging through the sentence is definitely worth it. Thomas is reflective in the last chapters and you understand that clawing at something larger won’t fulfill you because sometimes, it’s the things that are at home that will staunch your unending pursuit of so-called happiness.

UrbanWire gives Brother One Cell 4 out of 5 stars.

Brother One Cell is available at all good bookstores.