Scrappy Survivor vs. All-Seeing Eye

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/books/the-panopticon-a-debut-novel-by-jenni-fagan.html

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Anais, the narrator of Jenni Fagan’s fierce debut novel, describes herself as “just a girl with a shark’s heart.”

Anais is 15 and has spent most of her life in Scotland’s foster care system: “I got taken in when I was born, moved through 24 placements until I was 7, got adopted, left there when I was 11, moved another 27 times in the last four years.” Her “bio mum” reportedly gave birth to her in a psychiatric ward, then disappeared. Her adoptive mother, Teresa, a prostitute, was murdered. Her former boyfriend Jay is in jail. And now, Anais is under suspicion of having assaulted a policewoman, who remains in a coma.

“If the pig dies, I’m getting put into a secure unit until I’m 18,” she says. “Then jail. Except I won’t make it, I won’t make 16 — I’ll be dead.”

With Anais, Ms. Fagan — who, according to The Scotsman, grew up in foster care in and around Edinburgh and had shuttled among more than 20 placements by the time she was 12 — has created a feisty, brass-knuckled yet deeply vulnerable heroine, who feels like sort of a cross between Lisbeth Salander, Stieg Larsson’s “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” and one of Irvine Welsh’s drug-taking Scottish miscreants from “Trainspotting” or “Skagboys.” Her novel is by turns gritty, unnerving, exhausting, ferocious and occasionally pretentious.

When we first meet Anais, she’s being sent to a home for chronic young offenders called the Panopticon. The place was once a prison and a mental institution and takes its name from a prison design proposed in the late 18th century by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham that featured a series of rooms arranged around a central surveillance station. Ms. Fagan tries to use the Panopticon — with watchers in its tower who can “see into every bedroom, every landing, every bathroom” in the building — as a kind of metaphor for life in today’s Britain, where the proliferation of closed-circuit cameras and government databases has led to growing complaints about a surveillance state.

These efforts to make Anais’s story signify something larger can be clunky and labored — a force-feeding of allusions to classics like Kafka’s “Trial,” Anthony Burgess’s “Clockwork Orange” and Orwell’s “1984.” And in the book’s opening chapters, Anais’s story often feels as though it is being clumsily stage-managed by Ms. Fagan, who seems to want to jolt the tourist-reader into her narrator’s grim world with some determinedly sensational scenes: watching an addict shoot up in his genitals; meeting a sick kid named Brian who is said to have kidnapped a dog, “raped it, threw it off a wall” and broke its legs; and head-butting a girl so hard that she “makes a glutty pit-pit noise in her throat.” In the novel’s first half, a lot of Anais’s talk seems to consist of acid- and speed-induced hallucinations (“witches flying to and fro on the inside of my eyelids, they cackle and fly up in packs of 12”), and swaggering boasts (“I’ve read books you’ll never look at, danced to music you couldnae appreciate, and I’ve more class, guts and soul in my wee finger than you will ever, ever have.”) That, and rather tiresome disquisitions on her paranoid suspicion that she is part of some sort of wicked “experiment”: “It is always the same. In the nightmare they grow me from a pinprick, an infinitesimal scrap of bacterium, study me through microscopes while wearing radiation suits and masks.”

The Panopticon “has experiment written all over it,” she thinks, and she imagines that if she were to be sent to its as-yet-uncompleted high-security unit, watchers “would inject me in the head — with a big needle full of” something that “makes your skull see-through. Then they would put me in a box. The box would have a light switch that’d make my thoughts glow a different color, in my see-through skull. So they could read them. Forced telepathy — it’s the last step for total mind control.”

Anais also spends a lot of time imagining different families for herself — she’s got “offensively rich parents” in Paris, say, or is the sole offspring of Timothy Leary’s spirit guide and a forest nymph.

As the book progresses, Ms. Fagan stops forcing her story, and Anais comes into her own as a character — almost as though we were seeing a Polaroid photo of her develop before our eyes. We are given glimpses of the frightened girl beneath the tough-chick swagger and the lonesome child behind the angry adolescent. At the same time, we see the surrogate family that Anais and the other kids in the Panopticon gradually form, supporting one another against the system and its attempt to define them as lost causes, recidivist outlaws or hopeless cases.

There’s Isla, who’s H.I.V. positive and who has 2-year-old twins living with a foster family, and Isla’s girlfriend, Tash, who works as a prostitute to raise money to get them a home of their own. There’s a little girl named Alice who seems to be looking for a mother figure, and Shortie, a bully who’s always getting into fights.

The plot of “The Panopticon,” such as it is, concerns Anais’s fate within the system. Will she be found guilty of assaulting the policewoman? Will that act or another crime or misdemeanor get her committed to the secure facility she so dreads? Will she puzzle out an answer to her identity, perhaps discover who her birth parents really were?

These questions prove to be less interesting than Anais’s own emotional growth: her discovery of an ability to trust, even love, her mates at the Panopticon, and her realization that love more often than not entails loss. By its not-that-surprising conclusion, “The Panopticon” has evolved from a self-conscious debut experiment into a deeply felt and genuinely affecting novel.