Redemption

You would not expect Peter Lloyd's book to give a glowing account of Singapore. Working for the ABC and then getting arrested and convicted for drug use and then spending 6 months in a Singapore prison, tends to give you a jaundiced view of things. What it successfully does, with it's staccato chapters, cutting back and forth through various SE Asian tragedies, court hearings, counseling sessions and personal dramas, is create a sense of his personal chaos, followed eventually by peace and redemption. My initial ambivalence towards him, had by books end become respect.

Two quotes, the second a composite from pages 261 and 287:

That verbal tick again - lah. Singaporeans append lah to statements and sentences out of habit, with no form of rules for when and where it appears. Lah is to language what the appendix is the the human body - functionally redundant and occasionally irritating.

and

Singapore's laws have not been kind to me, but the penal system, at least, is a more forgiving place where I am safe and secure and oddly entertained. . . Of my material possessions, I have missed the sum total of nothing. Not the perpetual logging on and checking of emails. . . Instead I indulged a guilty pleasure called reading, devouring nearly eighty books in those two hundred days.