The Panic

Michael Clune’s debut novel Pan shares little beside its title and first-person perspective with the nineteenth-century Norwegian novella by Knut Hamsun about the erotic yearnings and pantheistic visions of a hunter who carries an effigy of the titular god on his cartridge case. Clune’s boldness consists in being altogether more literal. At the novel’s core is a metaphysical vision, which it presents fully, persuasively, and in detail, without metaphorical evasion or (once its hero forsakes the tender mercies of contemporary medicine and psychiatry) rationalizing explanation. The book is a theophany: the manifestation of a god—that is, of Pan, ancient Greek deity of woodland places, of panic, but sometimes also, as his name suggests, of everything, of the cosmos as a whole.