Pan <\/p>\n
Author: Michael Clune<\/p>\n
ISBN-13: 978-1911717614<\/p>\n
Publisher: Fern Press<\/p>\n
Guideline Price: \u00a316.99<\/p>\n
\u201cSpring is panic\u2019s season,\u201d writes Michael Clune near the beginning of his hallucinatory novel, Pan. \u201cBut panic, as I was to learn, isn\u2019t a disease of death. It\u2019s a disease of life.\u201d <\/p>\n
A dense, boundary-pushing and increasingly psychedelic book that draws you into its peculiar world \u2013 much like the experience of panic itself \u2013 Clune\u2019s debut wrestles with the elusive experience of consciousness (what it \u201cfeels like\u201d to have thoughts) and uses malleable teenage minds to do so.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s narrated in the first-person by 15-year-old Nick, forced at the novel\u2019s start to move in with his late-shift-working father to where he lives near Chicago: Chariot Courts, the \u201ccheapest place in all of Libertyville\u201d. At school Nick is mostly concerned with being cool and maintaining his \u201cbad-ass\u201d reputation. <\/p>\n
But the sudden onset of panic attacks \u2013 the opposite of \u201ccool\u201d \u2013 threatens to derail his standing. They crescendo just as the most popular kids in school, Tod (whose personality \u201cfloated just out of reach\u201d) and the open-minded, beautiful Sarah, subsume Nick and his best friend Ty into their gang. <\/p>\n
Together, they develop theories around Nick\u2019s panic attacks: that they are \u201cfear aroused by the presence of a god\u201d \u2013 namely, the Greek god Pan \u2013 and that \u201cyour consciousness gets so strong it actually leaps out of your mind entirely\u201d. They celebrate \u201cBelt Day\u201d (surely Beltaine) either to expel Pan, or surrender themselves to him.<\/p>\n
Yet the clan\u2019s drug-fuelled revelry and fanatic ideas begin to take a more sinister turn. Fusing elements of beat poetry, Greek philosophy and existentialism through the prism of American high school stories like Dazed and Confused, The Breakfast Club or SE Hinton\u2019s The Outsiders, Pan is a deliberately non-naturalistic portrayal of adolescence. <\/p>\n
The novel is rife with far-fetched theories about prophecy, age and perception, but studded with more attuned, grounded observations about class, work and family. <\/p>\n
The Ireland-born, Chicago-bred Clune is the author of two award-winning memoirs, White Out (a deep-dive into the heroin underground) and Gamelife (about gaming as a child); his two concerns, childhood and consciousness, are married here. <\/p>\n
A surreal, if slightly unwieldy, portrayal of teenagerhood, this mind-bending book is anchored by Clune\u2019s effortless, masterful humour: the result is not only an impressive debut, but a gargantuan feat in coming-of-age literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pan Author: Michael Clune ISBN-13: 978-1911717614 Publisher: Fern Press Guideline Price: \u00a316.99 \u201cSpring is panic\u2019s season,\u201d writes Michael…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30927,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[23944,353,49,48,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-30926","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-best-irish-book","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-canada","12":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30926\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}