Donald MacNeil

Journey to Hell - Donald Macneil ****

Although I have never been a fan of autobiographies, I have always had a bit of an interest in real life tales of hardship or endurance. Over the years I have read many prisoner of war and escape books, so decided to try a more modern twist and read about some of the drug dealers that have been imprisoned abroad.

What is it about?
In a nutshell : A man a little down on his luck falls in with some ‘bad’ guys after they invite him to teach them to sail show more their new yacht. A plan is concocted that involves an attempt to smuggle drugs half way around the world. The three of them set off on the trip, become captured along with their cargo and must face the consequences. Donald is found guilty at trial and is sentenced to a long jail term in a foreign prison. The prison he ends up is very different to his expectations and what we would consider human rights are not even remotely acknowledged. Donald describes the happenings of the underworld prison system, the attitude of the authorities and the difficulties faced in dealing with a very unique judicial system.

What did I like?
There wasn’t too much detail to get bogged down in and the majority of the events are laid out in a very straight forward manner. The authors writing skills are really quite good and pages fly by, you can tell this is an intelligent man and he doesn’t seem to pad out any of the actual events for added effect. I think you can trust him that the main dealings during his stay in prison really happened as he says they did, which is a must for these books to hold any credibility. The violent parts are described with fairly graphic detail and not a lot is left to the imagination, there is nothing worse than a book with the juicy parts left to the reader’s imagination.

What didn’t I like?
Firstly I just wish the author would have taken a lot more responsibility for his actions. As I have said previously, he comes across as a very intelligent person, and whilst I understand that we all experience weakness at times I find it extremely hard to believe that he was hooked into the deal as naively as he would have us believe. Here is a man that has a vast amount of real life experience attempting to explain his way out of being a drug runner by simply advising that he feared for his safety, and this is even before they have put together any concrete plans. At times it did start to sound a little bit too much of a sob story and I would have preferred it if he had just come out, and said something along the lines of ‘I was skint, drugs sounded an easy way to make money so I tried my luck’. There is also the possibility that he takes too much credit for any changes that are made for the better for the prisoners, but of course I wasn’t there so it is hard to say just how influential he really was in instigating reform.

Would I recommend?
I would, but as I have only read two books from this category (The other being ‘In the Shadow of Papillon) it is difficult to advise whether or not this is one of the better ‘foreign imprisonment’ offerings or not, but I have to say that I enjoyed it and that you may as well give it a go. show less

Journey To Hell, is a book about the deplorable conditions inside the Venezuela prison system, as experienced by the author, a British or Scottish citizen, for me it was unclear which country he was from. The two most amazing things about this book are:
1. The author appears to be the dumbest drug smuggler on the planet, having been given multiple opportunities to bail out or alert authorities to what he was being "forced" to do, he instead chose to go through with it.
2. The author writes in show more the most boring prose, that this book is actually very slow and quite boring. I have read numerous books written by or about foreigners in 3rd world prisons, and this is the first time I have found the story to be boring.
Lastly Donald, the author, is a died in the wool socialist, who hated Thatcher, and can not heap enough praise on what a wonderful man and politician Hugo Chavez, was, and all the great things he did for Venezuela, particularly being a thorn in America's side. Well Donald now that the citizens of the country can't buy toilet paper, and their currency is useless, how great were those social programs, if they can't be paid for.
Sadly this book turned out to be a very boring story about a very naive/stupid individual who got caught trying to smuggle £50million worth of cocaine, yet claims he had no idea how much it was worth. show less