I chose Jenni Fagan's Panopticon as one of my semester reads for several reasons. First I am familiar with Jeremy Bentham's panopticon design from Foucault's Discipline and Punish and was interested to see how/if Foucault's work was brought into this novel of a teenage girl. Second, I saw the blurb from one of my favorite writers, Irvine Welsh, touting Fagan as a new voice in Scottish literature using the vernacular.
So far I've read about 70 pages, and the main character, Anais, certainly has my attention! When the book starts, she is just entering the new facility, the panopticon and trying to navigate her way through. As the story continues, she begins to reveal portions of her life, some of it vividly distorted from the opiates she takes as an escape from her world. One is never quite sure what is actually taking place and what is a hallucination on her part. What is vague, however, is exactly what transpires to get her to the facility, although it appears she has killed a police officer.
Anais seems to have a few people in her life that she could count on and is beginning to acquaint herself with her fellow inmates. There's Brian, who has killed a dog in a most disturbing way, which she considers a worse, more horrific offense than her crime. However, she does seem to wonder about this, asking herself if it is indeed worse.
I'm anticipating that Anais will continue to reveal more as she trusts her reader more, just as she begins to open up to the other inmates. While I'm not quite sure that I like her as a character, there are certainly moments of empathy. Is she a kid who has found herself in difficult situations because she is on the search for a family/loved ones or is she truly distrubed and unsaveable is question still to be determined.
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