It's a curious historical footnote that the reformist and liberal-leaning founder of Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, was also the man who devised the sinister panopticon: a prison in which all inmates could be observed at all times from a central watchtower.
When 15-year-old Anais Hendricks is sent to a Midlothian home for chronic offenders inspired by Bentham's design, she sees the watchtower as the physical manifestation of what she's believed all her life: that she was created in a Petri dish by a shady group called "the experiment", who have been manipulating and monitoring her ever since.
Never having known her parents, or even their names, and having moved between foster parents and care homes about 50 times in her short life, Anais marks each birthday by imagining alternate lives for herself. Intelligent, articulate and with a preference for pillbox hats over hoodies, she fancies herself as having a quiet but bohemian lifestyle in Paris. Instead, her future is hanging in the balance as she waits for a policewoman in a coma, someone she has no memory of assaulting, to recover or die from her injuries.
In examining Anais's secret thoughts and deepest fears, it's hard not to feel complicity with her captors, but it's equally hard to look away. The combination of her natural paranoia, constant use of recreational drugs and the fierce bonds of loyalty which are forged in the institution gives her narrative a powerful intensity, an almost hyper-real edge that, when it can be pushed no further, segues into pure hallucination.
Fife-based author Jenni Fagan knocks it out of the park in one of the most revelatory debut novels from a Scottish author in some time, as dynamic and restless as Anais herself. The interplay in the temporary community formed by inmates and staff seems very well-informed, but the central character is a star, a vividly-realised teenager who has seen and experienced more horrible things in her short life than most of us could imagine, but whose spirit somehow prevents her from giving in and succumbing to an early death, urging her instead to strive to realise her dreams against all the odds.
THE PANOPTICON
Jenni Fagan
Windmill, £7.99
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