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A review by slippy_underfoot
The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan
4.0
What a fantastic book. I read Luckenbooth a few years ago, loved its powerful, hallucinatory quality, and was keen to read more of Jenni Fagan’s work. I don’t know why, but I had it in my head that The Panopticon was going to have a similar gothic otherness to it. I was soon disabused of this. The Panopticon is an unflinching, but so tender and delicate, tale of navigating a life without apparent hope, and building your own magic to survive.
Anais is fifteen and has spent her life in care. She’s forever in trouble, with an endless list of charges against her - theft, vandalism, assault – and has now, possibly, burned all her boats with a suspected attack on a police officer. If she’s found guilty, she will be detained until she is 18 and the statistics show that after this there is little chance of a “normal life”.
Anais is fifteen and has spent her life in care. She’s forever in trouble, with an endless list of charges against her - theft, vandalism, assault – and has now, possibly, burned all her boats with a suspected attack on a police officer. If she’s found guilty, she will be detained until she is 18 and the statistics show that after this there is little chance of a “normal life”.
As she waits in The Panopticon, she starts to bond with some of the other residents who observe and identify to some degree with the damage they can see inside each other. This is a social services accommodation, not a prison, so they are free to come and go before curfew. Some engage in hazardous sex work, all continue their substance abuse, increasing their sense of disjoint from society. The service workers supporting them struggle to penetrate their hard shells of scar tissue, and to make real human contact, contact which the residents often crave – to be seen as a person, not a problem.
Fagan’s writing is wonderful and vivid. She summons joy and horror with a few perfectly chosen words and evokes the Scottish dialect with sparing phonetics. This is pure witchery – one word in an entire sentence and you experience the full cadence of a voice, speaking directly to you.
It’s not an easy read, but it‘s an enthralling and rewarding one. Anais’ milieu is not enticing, but the peer pressure and the hopelessness make it hard to disclaim when you’ve been immersed in it all your life, and any other kind of life looks completely unattainable.