Quotes of the Day

When James Mawdsley was 20 years old and tormented by the injustice of the world, he tried to kill himself. Not long after he recovered, his considerable sympathies were captured by the plight of Burma. He decided that he would go there with the purpose of getting the country's ruling military junta to throw him in prison. As a protest, the gambit was somewhat flawed. The junta was happy to jail him, but they kept letting him out. Every time Mawdsley was deported, he would return, like a self-appointed Daniel in the lion's den.

Mawdsley's self-important tendencies can make him a target for mockery, and his admirable if maddening memoir The Iron Road is, at times, a bull's-eye. In Burma, a nation where so many suffer, the 29-year-old Briton's willing decision to add his pain to the mix can seem self-indulgent and quixotic. And yet, ultimately, Mawdsley comes across, like Don Quixote, as sympathetic, even a touch heroic. His heart is in the right place, even if the rest of him never seems to be.

Mawdsley's involvement with Burma begins like that of any gap-year activist. In 1996, inspired by opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's book Freedom from Fear, he hooks up with a refugee group in Burma, where he teaches English. Soon he hungers for a direct confrontation with the regime. After his one-man protest in Rangoon is broken up (it consists of Mawdsley locking himself to a gate and shouting democratic slogans while blasting the film soundtrack to The Mission), he decides that he will return with the intent of going to prison. He shrugs off conventional activism. "The powerfully written reports by NGOS and the sensationalist press—they all smack of hypocrisy and falsehood."

Mawdsley's first lengthy prison experience is intense, and it brings out the best in writing that is otherwise bland. He is arrested after sneaking back into Burma in 1998, and when he withholds his identity from police, they torture him. It's nothing that would make Amnesty International's Hall of Fame, but it is terrifying, and Mawdsley makes you feel it. Worst might be the "iron road," where a metal rod is rolled up and down the victim's shins until the skin is stripped to the bone. The terror almost leads him to abandon his mission.

All ambivalence, however, is wiped away by a religious experience, and he is no sooner released than he is booking his return ticket. Detained after protesting in Rangoon again in 1999, he is sentenced to 17 years and transferred to a solitary cell. While his family and friends orchestrate a campaign to draw attention to his cause, a motivated Mawdsley makes life hell for prison officials, demanding books, exercise time, a radio, everything but HBO. True, his demands are his chief means of challenging the corrupt regime, but there aren't many works of prison literature that can trigger a bit of sympathy for the police state.

Ultimately, the only political prisoner released due to Mawdsley's efforts is Mawdsley himself. Maybe that was enough. The most affecting moments of the book come when he connects with a fellow prisoner, and by his sheer unlikely presence reminds the other that the outside world still cares. As Mawdsley himself writes, "I was a fool but my intentions were noble and compassionate." That's more than most of us can say.

• BRYAN WALSH
• In his memoir The Iron Road, James Mawdsley relates how he went to jail for a free Burma—twice