Sunday, August 4, 2013

A Book A Week - Week 31: The Panopticon

This week's book:
   The Panopticon   by Jenni Fagan

Grade:  A

Brutal.  So very, very brutal.  Yet lovely.

Good news, now I'm batting .500 with first novels.  The Panopticon was a very entertaining read.  And, like The Interestings, completely outside my genre comfort zone.  Maybe I can't say that any more.  Maybe this now is my genre comfort zone.  Freaky.  Mind bendy...

This is the story of a forgotten girl, Anais, someone who's fallen between the cracks of the social welfare system and is on her way to a permanent place in the criminal justice system.  It's also the story of how she copes with her bleak reality, and how she tries to make a family when she has no real family of her own, and how she deals with having very little control over her own life while abject incompetents and outright hostiles move her around like a pawn.

Drugs.  She deals with it mainly by doing drugs.  Lots of drugs.  The heroine is, essentially, high on something for most of the novel.  And the novel takes place over the course of about two months. That's a lot of drugs.  But as the reader comes to understand the bleak reality she faces daily, the reasons for her constant drug abuse become clear.  Almost acceptable.

The novel opens with Anais - not the name on her birth certificate - being taken to The Panopticon, a home for troubled youth in Scotland.  It's a tough-love facility, and her last chance before being put in a double-max security penitentiary for juveniles.  She has to make good at The Panopticon or else she's going to big-girl jail.  But the decks's stacked against her, she's got a long history with the local police, and they have her pegged as a 'Lifer,' someone who's always been in trouble and who always will.  But Anais isn't like that, not really.  Until she is.
   The thing is, Anais is convinced there's something called 'the experiment' that has been monitoring and controlling her, her family, her friends, and everyone at The Panopticon.  They're the ones responsible for her situation, they're the ones who made her, and who took away her adoptive mother.
  But is Anais really paranoid, is she making it all up, is it a coping mechanism?  Or is 'the experiment' real?

The Panopticon is written in first-person dialect, kind of like 'Huckleberry Finn,' but with a Scottish accent.  That sets the mood, and defines who Anais is.  I bought into it completely, after a few pages you get used to it, and then it becomes almost poetry.

I think the author did a great job conveying the mood, and giving the reader insight into Anais's character and the deep emotional scarring that makes her act the way she does.  Her inner dialogue reveals her as a dreamer, a gentle soul caught up in a terrible reality that was never intended for her.
    Also, the situation felt very real to me.  The kids caught in the middle, forgotten, neglected, given-up-on.  I don't know if the author has a background dealing with troubled youth, but it sure feels like she's writing from dirty, bitter experience.  Tell you the truth, in parts I got kind of pissed off, no one should be treated that way.

If I had one quarrel, it would be that one huge plot thread the author never quite wraps up.  Not sufficiently for me.  I guess that's a first novel for you.  But we do get to know, in the end, exactly who Anais really has become.

Get the damn book and read it, already.

Next week:
 Zealot by Reza Aslan
 A book about the historical Jesus, written by - gasp - a Muslim.  The human shit stains over at Fox News blew a gasket over that one.  Just made me want to buy the book all that much more.

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