It's a day since I finished this book, and it's decidedly one of the most depressing things I've ever read. Some people say The Wow. Where to start...
It's a day since I finished this book, and it's decidedly one of the most depressing things I've ever read. Some people say The Road is bleak, but it ain't go nothing on The Panopticon, well, except a Pulitzer.
Despite the misery of the whole thing - child abuse, dead mums, teens doing drugs, suicides, kids fucking dogs (I kid you not!) - I am glad I read it. Anais (named after one of my literary hero's Anais Nin) is a believable character. She's got presence, soul and a heart. She's also completely fucked.
An institutional teen who grew up in foster care, Anais dreams of a better life, but the choices she makes and the people in her life keep holding her back. At 15 she finds herself in a panopticon for teens (which is basically a prison where you can be seen at all times), after being accused of putting a policewoman in a coma.
Some angles of the story are never fully developed, and while this can be annoying at times, it's also very much like real life. I mean how often do we find out everything? How often do we discover the end of every thread of every story?
I also generally dislike stream of consciousness writing, I had a very bad experience with Virginia Woolf, but I think it works well here. I can't imagine the yanks getting on very well with the heavy Scottish dialogue, but for me it made it all the more authentic and helped me give Anais a voice. Don't get me wrong, in places where she was whacked out of her head on drugs, which actually happened quite a lot, the prose got quite loose, but considering the situation Anais was in it seemed legit.
There's loads about The Panopticon I didn't like that much - the generic friends she found in care which seemed like they'd been picked out of a who's who of stereotypes - the cutter, the whore, the angry one.. blah, it's been done too many times now!
Oh, and although this panopticon place is meant to be a prison, how come they can go in and out at all hours? Seemed a bit contrived to me. But hey, on the whole I loved Anais. I loved how 'real' this felt, and I hated how sad it made me feel that this is happening to kids in the real world right now.
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