The Panopticon: A Novel, by Jenni Fagan, arrived on our shores last July. Ms Fagan, a Scottish poet and mother of a toddler, provides a disturbing, yet ultimately optimistic debut novel.
First person protagonist Anais Hendricks, a 15 year old caught in the sump of the UK’s foster care system, leads us into her world, endlessly cycling through uncaring foster homes and scores of petty encounters with police constables (PCs) as she enters the Panopticon, the last stop for teens who have no one else to take care of them.
Fagan’s main concern is the insulated world inside this facility, with about a dozen young people overseen by several fundamentally sympathetic social workers, Joan and Angus chief among them. Anais quickly explores her surroundings and fellow wards of the state. There’s Isla, an HIV+ young lady who gave birth to infected twins, her lover Tash, still selling herself out in the city, and Shortie, with whom Anais tussles for alpha status, quickly diverting them both to friendship.
Several boys make up the rest of the family, but they are much less completely drawn. Only Brian, a sniveling outcast who is constantly picked on by all the others, makes much of an impression. And then there’s Jay, her old boyfriend who may or may not be texting Anais from prison, claiming to be on the verge of release and begging her to come find him at the “safe house”.
The Panopticon is not a prison; the young people can pretty much come and go as they choose, smuggling in drugs, exiting for ill-fated adventures on the outside, and generally continuing their lives apart from the society which has not found a place for them.
Anais herself has been in 51 separate placements she was meant to call home, starting with the mental institution in which her nameless mother gave birth to her, after being picked up on the streets in labor. Immediately after dropping Anais, she flew out the window, to her death or disappearance, neither we nor Anais know. As a pre-teen, Anais did get lucky to live with “Mother” Teresa, a sometime prostitute, who one morning was found dead in the bathtub, leaving Anais with a permanent sense of dislocation and loss of the only love she’d ever experienced.
The narrative thrust of this novel lies in Anais’ emotional arc as she awaits her fate following an alleged attack on PC Craig, in a coma for most of the book after being laid low, possibly by Anais, possibly not. While Anais continually gets herself into scraps with the law, the system, and the community at large, she is only enacting the world she has been presented with; her heart is always moving towards peace within a family, and if the world won’t give her one, she’ll have to create it herself.
Ms. Fagan has a poets’ eye for detail, for convolution, and for tangential description. Thankfully, her characters talk about the action a bit after it has happened; their discussions are always more revealing than the world as viewed and described by Anais, who, after all, is a confused 15 y/o life-long orphan. In addition, the author has incorporated a fair amount of vernacular spelling, a bit like Twain in Huck Finn. Once I realised that, say, tae = to, dinnae = didn’t, urnay = you’r not, etc., I was able to follow the action more completely through Anais’ eyes.
This novel only becomes a page turner in its second half; narrative tension is not its strong suit. But Fagan’s prose and her creation of Anais slowly wormed its way into my consciousness, deeply informing me of just what a life might be like without any moorings in the community most of us take for granted. Still, this is not an indictment of the “system”, but more of a prose poem to open our eyes about the strength of the human need for connection. Anais, like another young outsider, Lisbeth Salander, is a character you will not soon forget. And likewise Jenni Fagan, if she chooses to keep writing prose.
4.5/5 stars