You shall never regret doing so. Trust me, I didn't. Many friends have thanked me so very much when I loaned it to them.
"Papillon" is marred only by its misconceptions and dated, wrong ideas, especially about health and nutrition. Also, women readers may find the constant diet of adventure with only rare mentions of his loved ones back in France, and of the two children he fathered by girls of a welcoming native tribe, rather unsatisfying. One further jarring note is, as in true in prisons today, apparently a high percentage of the inmate population claim they are "innocent"--a concept that stretches Charriere's credibility.
Charriere was condemned to imprisonment for life in a penal colony in the French Guyana, for supposedly murdering a man when he was twenty-five. Reaching the prison camp in South America, he didn't stop for one moment to try inumerous and different ways to escape and have back the normal life of an honest man. In the book, Papillon tells us how were the years in prison, the friendship with other inmates, the terrible and inhuman confinement in a prison cell he had to take alone for two years as a punishment while in prison, the evasions and what he did in the brief time he was a free man in Colombia.
All the while, Charriere kept the word that all that was in the book really happened to him during his years in prison in South America. I tried to believe that for most of the book, but there were some things that made me believe that, while the essence of his very hard times is told in the book, the narrative was transformed to provide the readers a more compelling story. As an example, the constant division of the characters in the book: those who were totally friendly and loyal to Papillon, and those who only wanted him to suffer.
But what is important in "Papillon" is Charriere's strenght and his extreme denial in accepting his terrible fate, always trying to make his life and his friends' a little better in the situation they were. Aside from that, it's important to notice that the "correction facilities" and inmates situation maybe haven't changed that much since the 1930s and 1940s. I'm not defending people who were convicted from crimes they have commited, all I'm saying is that the legal system must have a commitment to the people they convict.
Grade 9.0/10