CRIME
Panic
Catherine Jinks
Text, $34.99
Catherine Jinks is a multi-award-winning writer of works in many different genres. Like her recent thriller Traced, Panic is fast and furious, moving from one crisis to another in the blink of an eye. Set in the present in rural NSW, Panic is fuelled by the use and misuse of the internet. Parents of children under 16 might do well to read it – just for the information it contains, apart from the horrifying thrill of the darkness and twisted criminality of the plot.
When people panic, they generally cease to behave rationally, and the first-person narrator, Bronte Fleming, a young social work graduate, is frequently placed in situations that give rise to panic. She constantly tries to act rationally, but has a kind of fatal innocence, so that most of her decisions only lead to further ghastly troubles.
Everything is set in motion when Bronte is betrayed by her boyfriend. She posts an outrageous and disgusting video of her naked self in a moment of drunken stupidity. It becomes known as “Pussybugs Girl”, and it goes viral. In a dramatic attempt to escape the shame, the trolls, and the widespread recognition, Bronte goes into a sort of hiding by finding a volunteer job in a wellness retreat in rural NSW. But she has only moved into a spiral of further nightmare.
At the retreat, in an old mansion called Gwendolynne, she has the task of being carer and companion to Nell, the mildly demented mother of Veda, who owns the retreat. Elder abuse is one of several serious themes in the novel. As well as running her retreat of spiritual birthing suites, “YouBorn”, Veda is a member of a political group that holds “common law assemblies”, believing that “governments are just corporate entities with ABNs”. The group is organising a “citizens’ defence militia”.
Things go from bad to worse in Catherine Jinks’ new novel.Credit: Maja Baska
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Both YouBorn and the assemblies are satirised in the book. Bronte, caught in their web, fails to perceive their true lunacy and danger, to her peril. She innocently imagines that if she needs to leave these “paranoid nutty new-age anarchists”, she can find another volunteer job online. However, Veda, grotesque in her authority, confiscates Bronte’s phone, severely limiting her access to it. The police are described by Veda as “satanic paedophiles” who have no jurisdiction at Gwendolynne because in 1973 the country’s Constitution was changed “without a referendum”. Hence, the government and the police are “illegal”. The police play a key role throughout, sometimes appearing to be on Bronte’s side, sometimes not.
In traditional thriller fashion, most chapters end with a cliffhanger, as the plot moves relentlessly through one claustrophobic complication after another. “The noise had been a gunshot”: Bronte discovers a cache of guns and ammunition hidden in the house. Central to the whole horror of Gwendolynne are the two “panic rooms” she finds. She tries to use these to her own advantage but is out of her depth. She attempts to lighten her perceptions of the people around her by describing them in entertaining similes of which there are at least 20. When a policewoman speaks in a mild tone, she is described as “a pitbull in a baby’s bonnet”. Forever looming in the background is “the dam”, its sinister purpose not revealed until late in the story. Its menace puts the reader’s imagination to work.
