TITLE: The Enchanted
AUTHOR: Rene Denfeld
GENRE: General Fiction
PUBLISHED: March 4, 2014
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon.com
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
Description: "This is an enchanted place. Others don’t see it, but I do."
The enchanted place is an ancient stone prison, viewed through the eyes of a death row inmate who finds escape in his books and in re-imagining life around him, weaving a fantastical story of the people he observes and the world he inhabits. Fearful and reclusive, he senses what others cannot. Though bars confine him every minute of every day, he marries visions of golden horses running beneath the prison, heat flowing like molten metal from their backs with the devastating violence of prison life.
Two outsiders venture here: a fallen priest and the Lady, an investigator who searches for buried information from prisoners’ pasts that can save those soon-to-be-executed. Digging into the background of a killer named York, she uncovers wrenching truths that challenge familiar notions of victim and criminal, innocence and guilt, honesty and corruption—ultimately revealing shocking secrets of her own.
A wondrous and redemptive debut novel, set in a stark world where evil and magic coincide, The Enchanted reminds us of how our humanity connects us all, and how beauty and love exist even amidst the most nightmarish reality.
Review: The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld is an amazing book; I was so stunned after I read it that I immediately started researching the author. What I learned is this: Rene Denfeld is not only an author, but also a Mitigation Specialist, and a fact Investigator in death penalty cases. After learning this, I don't think it is a stretch to say that the character known only as "The Lady" (also a death penalty investigator) may be autobiographical. I especially love fiction that contains a big chunk of their author's hopes, dreams, and feelings. I find books that do so manage to burrow their way into my own mind and heart, haunting me for a very long time.
The Enchanted is told either in the first person, by the nameless narrator, or in the third person when addressing other characters. The story moves skillfully between the characters, giving them room to develop. The narrator remains unnamed, and while his identity is hinted at, it is not revealed until the end of the novel. Other characters are introduced during explanation of the narrator's daily prison life and known only as descriptions, perhaps to better signify what it's like to be known only as the sum of your parts and not by by your name: the Lady, York, the Warden, the Fallen Priest, the white haired boy. These characters and other secondary characters, prisoners and staff, appear throughout the book. The narrator describes the Lady thusly:
“The lady hasn’t lost it yet—the sound of freedom. When she laughs, you can hear the wind in the trees and the splash of water hitting pavement. You can sense the gentle caress of rain on your face and how laughter sounds in the open air, all the things those of us in this dungeon can never feel.”
The Warden is the easiest character to understand, unlike the other characters which are not all good or all bad, he is simply a good man. The narrator says of the Warden:
“Even if the outside saw another nameless number, even if the mattresses of my life said just another, the warden saw something different. He saw what had been done to me. He saw me. And in that moment, I mattered.”
The narrator doesn't say anything about the crimes that put him in prison, or what happened to him before that, but he does talk a lot about his rabid love for books and reading. As I share that same feeling, this made me rather fond of him, which made it all the more shocking when his identity is revealed. The narrator says only of his life:
“After a time, it seemed that the world inside the books became my world. So when I thought of my childhood, it was dandelion wine and ice cream on a summer porch, like Ray Bradbury, and catching catfish with Huck Finn. My own memories receded and the book memories became the real memories, far more than the outside, far more even than in here.”
While there are a few truly vile characters, all the characters are explored thoroughly and have so many layers that we find ourselves feeling a tiny kernel of sympathy for characters we initially loath. Our nameless narrator adds a bit of colorful magical realism by imagining golden horses snorting and shuffling their hooves beneath the prison and small men with tiny hammers within its walls. After the introduction of the setting and the characters, the plot crystallizes: an inmate, York, wants to die and not only accepts his fate but looks forward to his demise. However, it is the Lady's job to uncover evidence to help with his appeal.
As the Lady carefully investigates York’s past, she discovers disturbing parallels to her own life too compelling to dismiss, and begins to identify with this monster that was created by tragedy and circumstance. Her need to reconcile the darkness within herself to the light she desires becomes overwhelming. Surely her past, things undeniably beyond her control, does not define her. This book speaks of the abused, the neglected, the forgotten, the mentally ill, and while The Enchanted doesn’t dismiss the crimes committed by the prisoners, or the suffering of the victims, it asks for compassion for those that society has failed.
The narrator explains where his dark thoughts come from:
Men who have not been violated don’t understand what it is like to have the edges of your body blurred—to feel that every inch of your skin is a place where fingers can press, that every hole and orifice is a place where others can put parts of their bodies. When your body stops being corporeal, your soul has no place to go, so it finds the next window to escape.
My soul left me when I was six. It flew away past a flapping curtain over a window. I ran after it, but it never came back. It left me alone on wet stinking mattresses. It left me alone in the choking dark. It took my tongue, my heart, and my mind.
When you don’t have a soul, the ideas inside you become terrible things. They grow unchecked, like malignant monsters. You cry in the night because you know the ideas are wrong—you know because people have told you that—and yet none of it does any good. The ideas are free to grow. There is no soul inside you to stop them.
Overall, the writing is stunningly beautiful and has a dreamlike, ethereal quality that persists throughout the book. Oh, don't misunderstand me: this is a dark, depressing book. Some moments will bring you to tears, or at least bring a lump to your throat. Yet somehow, the author manages writing so luminous that it rendered me speechless. It took me a long time to write this review because I couldn't understand how she could do it - I had to go back and read the book again. Even on the second read, I kept finding more passages I wanted to quote, nuances I hadn't seen before, and the scenes still clutched at my heart the way they did the first time around. Denfeld manages to contain hope and beauty to a storyline that redeems it bleakness - without sugarcoating the brutal truths of prison. No small feat.
Five enthusiastic stars and my strongest recommendation.
