When Nicholas is fifteen, he begins to experience an unusual awareness of “the weirdness of my face and skull being a thing that had somehow trapped this thinking- looking that was thinking this very thought that was burrowing out of my head”. This sensation first occurs in his geometry class, and by the third occasion Nick finds that he can delay the onset of symptoms; one night he is able to read the whole of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe before he loses control. Suitably freaked out, Nick visits a doctor, who diagnoses a panic disorder and prescribes paper bags to use once the giddiness sets in.
Nick continues to hang out with his friend Ty, worrying about their status among the cliques of their American high school, and tentatively flirts with Sarah, who sits in front of him in class. She is fascinated by the way Nick views the world during his panic attacks and they research his diagnosis in the school library. Eventually, she connects the dots – central to the word panic is Pan.
Sarah’s friends are a group of semi-alternative teenagers – and a college student, Ian – whose general apathy towards the politics of high-school life coheres into a particular kind of coolness. They hang out in Ian and his brother Tod’s barn, drinking, smoking and taking LSD; Nick sits this aspect out, knowing from his research that substances can make his symptoms worse. When the friends are high, Nick is a “semisacred personage in the Barn”; they are fascinated by the idea that he might have more thoughts than “just the ones you need”. Ian has termed this phenomenon “loose mind”, which he purports to share. (The rest are stuck with “solid mind”.)
A series of cult-like practices takes place: a topless, animalistic bacchanal for “Belt Day”; several cruelties inflicted on drugged mice; a voyeuristic sex experiment. When he is not at the Barn, Nick is still trying to figure out his symptoms; the intensity of his disorder has befuddled doctors. The faster he establishes theories of panic, the further the paganism of the Barn goes. The leader of this small cult is the drug-addled Ian, and soon Nick’s theses, combined with Ian’s ravings, solidify into a belief system: the first (and later second) “Church of Pan”. The panic – which included some apparent powers, such as Nick prophesying minor weather events and, at one point, seeing his own eyelids – might actually be “insight” after all.
The theories of this religion come thick and fast. There is loose mind vs solid mind, and there are two “levels” on which people can operate; in a different hypothesis, some people are “hollows”, while others might be able to host the god. Nick also delves into art and human culture to discover evidence of how far back this system goes. There is Ivanhoe, Oscar Wilde’s Salome, Bach and, eventually, Bellini. Nick is awed and terrified by the responsibility of communicating “Pan’s thought, Pan’s perspective, Pan’s insight”, and in a moment of dread he is convinced that he has glimpsed the deity. Nick is a persuasive narrator, but it is precisely the absence of a satisfying throughline to his overthinking that conveys the jarring experience of living in a state of psychosis. In the end, it is Ty who offers the clearest theory of all: “People will make a church out of any bad thing”.
Pan is Michael Clune’s first novel, following two memoirs and three books of criticism. It is thoroughly engrossing and, despite the seriousness of Nick’s condition, thoroughly entertaining. Nick’s tone switches between wry disaffection and breathless anxiety. (Insomnia jolts him awake one night with the agitated conviction that sleep is eight hours of temporary death: “Exactly what, I thought, is UNCONSCIOUSNESS? And HOW could I just LET IT HAPPEN?”). But Pan’s greatest strength lies in Nick’s complete alienation “from the object world”, which imbues everything with the intensity of his panicked state. We have pretty much no choice but to take the word of an intelligent and mentally unwell fifteen-year- old who is trying to figure everything out for the first time.
Lily Herd is an assistant editor at the TLS
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