With Incarceron (Dial/Penguin, $17.99, 9780803733961/0803733968, ages 12-up), Catherine Fisher expands on the classic themes of the prisons we make for ourselves and the prisons we are born into and from which we must break free. Incarceron is a living, pulsing prison with red "eyes" that peer at its prisoners and a means of communicating with them. Legend says that one person was able to escape from Inside--a Sapient named Sapphique. A small band of inmates attempts to follow Sapphique's example: Finn, who believes he was born Outside; Keiro, his aggressive oath brother; Attia, who helped save their lives; and Gilas, a Sapient who believes strongly in the legend of Sapphique. On the Outside, the Warden of Incarceron arranged the marriage of his daughter, Claudia, to Giles, heir to the throne. But Giles is dead, and now she must marry Caspar, who will become a puppet king of a society stagnating in a medieval-like "Era" (artificially frozen in time to avoid the dangers of modern technology). She grows increasingly curious about Incarceron, especially after she discovers clues that Giles may still be alive. When Claudia and Finn fall into possession of identical crystal keys, they begin to communicate--each believing the other may be able to help them escape their fates. We spoke with Catherine Fisher about Incarceron.
Obviously I set up the idea of the Inside and Outside from the beginning. Most of the characters Inside want to get out. The Outside believes the Inside is perfect, but it isn't. I did have the thought that [one significant character] who is born Inside is Outside, and then Finn, who believes he was born Outside, who's Inside. But most were not set up from the beginning and developed as ramifications of the plot.
Claudia wants Finn to be the person she once knew as Giles, rightful ruler of the kingdom. Yet within their band, Finn happily forfeits the leadership position to Keiro. Does each of them see what he wants to see?
I think Claudia wants to get out of her wedding, of course, so she's looking for a substitute. She latches onto Finn for that. I wanted to leave it ambiguous as to whether Finn is Giles or not. That's resolved in the sequel. With Keiro, he's the alpha male and takes the lead. But Finn is an interesting character to write about; he's not straightforward. He's quite manipulative and reinvents himself in different ways.
He is a slippery character: he knows his role in trapping the Maestra in that first scene, yet he does not do everything he can to keep her safe--and then he feels guilty for it.
We presume Finn is innocent when he arrives at the prison, if he is Giles. But then he becomes guilty by association, and by not doing as much as he can. But then how can one person change a whole society? The Maestra is a case in point: he tells her how he found himself in prison, and he knows he's working on her sympathies, and he does the same with Claudia later on.
The question of trust comes up repeatedly. Can Finn trust Keiro?
Is he trustworthy? Are either of them trustworthy really? Finn is the hero you instinctively trust, but Keiro does his own thing most of the time; he's more straightforward in many ways. The characters take on a life of their own. Keiro is very popular with readers. And Jared is another popular character.
There are those in the prison who believe in Sapphique, and others who doubt. Jared, Claudia's tutor, is a Sapient on the Outside and doesn't recognize the name Sapphique. How did you go about constructing this character that we never see?
I wanted again to keep the doubt about whether Sapphique ever existed or if he is a legendary figure that people in the prison created out of a need. He's not known on the Outside. The next book is called Sapphique [so some of those questions will be explored further]. I see him more as an angel-like figure or a fallen angel, a "culture hero" as we used to call them.
Gildas says, quoting Sapphique, "What lives in the Cave is a hunger that can never be satisfied. An emptiness that can never be filled." Yet all of the characters have a hunger that cannot be satisfied, don't they? Except perhaps Attia and the Maestra?
I think you're right--the Maestra is not content and we don't see much of her, but she's quite balanced. Attia has a hunger because I think she loves Finn, but I don't think he returns it. They're all questing for something--even the prison itself, which we get into in the later book.
On the Outside, there's a deliberate and conscious effort--a "Protocol"--always to conceal the truth of the present, and conform to "the Era," as they call it, and anything "non-Era" is illegal. Isn't that a kind of prison for those on the Outside?
It is prison. Both societies are a prison. Both are meant to be like paradise, and are a hell. I'm not sure where that came from. I thought, "What if you had a society that had limits?" and I got interested in that idea of a static world. The other contrast is that in the prison everything is changing, and Outside nothing changes.
Both your Oracle Prophecies and Incarceron ask the question, can we ever get at the truth?
Certainly in the Oracle we can't, because how can we know what He wants of us? There's lots of different interpretations. Is there a certain truth? I don't know. I like to set these questions up and play with them. It's just as well if it leaves people thinking.--Jennifer M. Brown
