Book Review: The Enchanted – A Novel, by Rene Denfeld

I plucked a copy of The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld off the new Science Fiction/Fantasy shelf at my local library thinking, “Hmm, here’s a science fiction author I’ve never heard of before”.  About fifty pages into the novel, it became apparent why that was – The Enchanted is neither a Sci-Fi nor Fantasy novel, but during the first dozen or so pages it does a damn fine impression of one.  In these opening passages, we become acquainted with our narrator (for at least part of the book), a lifer in an ancient stone prison who describes his environment as “enchanted”.  He goes on to describe the sub-basement where he resides with a select few other inmates as a “dungeon” constructed of ancient stone, where little men with hammers reside in the walls and golden horses stampede underground.  This narrator quickly introduces us to the Lady, described in near allegorical terms as being the recipient of almost devotional love by our narrator and the other inmates.  The Lady’s association with the Fallen Priest continues the illusion that we’re dealing with archetypical characters in a surreal, dreamlike fantasy.  The time period in question is ambiguous at best.  All we know is that the prison is ancient, enchanted, and populated with characters that are described in heavily symbolic, as opposed to human, terms.

It is only after the scene shifts away from the “dungeon” and the narration bleeds into third-person omniscient that we perceive that this is not a tale from some long ago era of virtuous maidens and hero priests.  Rather, the action takes place in the modern era, complete with telephones, automobiles and modern medicine.  The novel is about a very modern topic – execution as a viable punishment in our modern criminal justice system, and our inmate-narrator who opened the book is one of those death-row denizens, and likely mentally-ill to boot.  The Lady turns out to be a death row investigator – those professionals who investigate the backgrounds and circumstances of those inmates sentenced to execution with an aim toward obtaining mitigating or extenuating information that can be presented in court to commute their sentences to ones of mere “life in prison”.  The Fallen Priest is a Catholic Priest who has voluntarily given up the cloth while he sorts out his own “crisis of faith” stemming from his tragic relationship with an underage stripper.  In due time we are introduced to the Warden, the natural nemesis of the Lady, who turns out to be a good man struggling under the burden of a wife who has a terminal cancer diagnoses.  We are also introduced Conroy, the corrupt intelligence officer, Risk, the big-shot inmate who runs a criminal enterprise behind the bars of the prison, the Fair-Haired Boy, a new arrival at the prison and the latest victim of the corrupt Risk/Conroy partnership, along with Striker and York, other residents of the death row dungeon, the latter of whom is the Lady’s latest client.

While I think my library erred badly in classifying the novel as Sci-Fi/Fantasy, I do not think that the author was deliberately deceptive when she opened the novel as a light, dream-like fantasy – an illusion that she masterfully maintains throughout key passages in the novel.  It takes a deft touch to maintain the light, airy nature of the prose when dealing with such weighty issues as mental illness, sexual abuse and the death sentence.  Since the book largely revolves around the Lady and her attempts to liberate York from death row (an endeavor that York himself resists), it is easy to walk away with the impression that Denfeld is an opponent of capital punishment.  However, it became apparent to me that the novel is not so much about condemnation of the death penalty, either explicitly or by inference, but rather about each individual character’s question for salvation from their own unique circumstances.  York seeks to liberate himself from his damaged life through the very death sentence that the Lady seeks to commute.  The Lady seeks to liberate herself from her own damaged past which shares many similarities with those of the men who sit on death row, while working so passionately to save an inmate who is in favor of his own execution.  The Fallen Priest seeks to learn an entirely new way to live now that the only life he knew, that of the cloth, is no longer viable.  The Warden seeks to reconcile how to live in a seemingly contradictory universe where the death comes hard to the death-row denizens under his care but comes so tragically easy to his dearly beloved wife.  Meanwhile, in the background, the prison itself undergoes its own Shawshank-like redemption as the corrupt dynamic between Conroy and Risk is purged at its very roots by the Fair-Haired Boy who undergoes his own painful metamorphosis into a man.

The novel achieves its ends deftly and masterfully, however, it is not perfect.  I found the harshness of prison life to be exaggerated somewhat, perhaps purposefully to make a more compelling read.  For instance, descriptions of prison food as being nothing more than the expired cast offs from grocery stores and restaurants is at odds with my own limited experience with the State Prison System, where unconfirmed rumors abound of employees being treated to the expired food stuffs so that the fresher food could be saved for the inmates.  Meanwhile, it seems lost on the author that the blue-forested backwoods where the Lady seems to find solace was simultaneously the setting that enabled the rampant abuse that scarred York’s soul to occur unabated.  However, these are minor gripes at best, and may have resulted from an overly-heavy editorial hand.

Again, those who are quick to see a critique of the death penalty in this novel would do well to note that not only does the Lady fail (quite deliberately) to save York from his sentence, but that every death row inmate we are introduced to ultimately meet their fate in the prison’s execution chamber.  However, it would be equally foolhardy to read the story as a defense of the system.  Rather, the story is an act of resignation to the idea that all systems are flawed, that our world is in some ways irrevocably broken, but that avenues of salvation are open to even the most destitute among us.  Our death row narrator, whose identity proves to be somewhat of a surprise by the novel’s end, ultimately champions love as the means to salvation, and continues to champion it despite being virtually unloved himself at the end.  While I still maintain that the novel is mislabeled as Sci-Fi or Fantasy, the author’s ability to maintain the allegorical and dream-like quality of the story up to the very end is both noteworthy and effective.  At most, the novel seems to be without and easy categorization, and its ability to defy labels harkens back to a point made earlier in the novel when the Lady learns from an ancillary character that, well, “some things just don’t need names”.

I would give the novel 4 out of 5 stars and recommend it to anyone who, needing a break from their normal reading fare, may be interested in the seemingly “light” handling of undeniable “heavy” subjects.