“This is an enchanted place. Others don’t see it but I do.”

It’s not easy to find the words to talk about this one. It’s a searing yet oddly gentle dive into a prison, focusing on its death row. It’s unlike anything I have read before. The hardest story, imparted with the most tender, lyrical writing.

“York knows the truth doesn’t matter in here. Inside, the lies you tell become the person you become. On the outside, sun and reality shrink people back to their actual size. In here, people grow into their shadows.”

At its heart is an unnamed Lady, an investigator. She is hired when activists and lawyers find among the inmates bound for death, one they deem worthy of the grace of life in prison. Her task is to find the elements in their life, their troubled past, that would secure this more “lenient” sentence.

“And the secrets are so many. […] How no one here never dies of abuse, of rape, of being killed by the guards. How the records– what records? A prison is a place without history.”

The lady herself has a baggage of her own, and she often crosses paths with the fallen priest that tends to the detainees’ souls. They slowly weave a link.

“She bows her head, listening. Storms blow through her. What is in our world that breeds such howling despair?”

We follow them, as the lady takes on the case of a convict who refuses her help, one who is determined to die.

“My soul left me when I was six. It flew away past a flapping curtain over a window. I ran after it, but it never came back. It left me alone on wet stinking mattresses. It left me alone in the choking dark. It took my heart, my tongue, and my mind.”

Here is an ecosystem where hope rubs shoulders with despair, where some search for redemption while others have just one desire : to end it all and finally be free. 

“On the outside, people think clocks tell them the time. They set an alarm for work and wake up to a blinking light that says 6 a.m. They look to an office wall to tell them if it is time to go home. The truth is, clocks don’t tell time. Time is measure in meaning.”

And we have our narrator. He is one of the forsaken souls that inhabit the prison. A monster, dangerous and unredeemable. And yet… He is insightful, surprisingly caring, full of poetry. And yes, damaged. He was victim of, and then committed an unspeakable crime, from which he indeed expects no redemption.

“They can keep men in here, under lock and key, deep in the dungeon until the final moments of their lives, so that men like York and me will never taste the rain. But they cannot keep us from passing our condensation on to the sky. They cannot keep us from raining down in China.”

So we get immersed in this corrupted, ugly, violent prison. Here we meet people who try to cling to their humanity amidst the misery, suffering people, honest people, corrupted and vicious ones, or some who are a mix of everything.

“The night silk skies, they fail to exist. The dark road is like a ribbon under your car. Gone. Your wife waiting for you, even the tiny dimple at the corner of her mouth. Gone. The stars outside — oh, to see them with her once more — and the faint smell of barbecue for the birthday you missed again because you were working late again. Gone.”

Through all this, the luminous writing shows us the way. The Enchanted can be read as a severe indictment of the carceral system. But to me it was even more than that. More intimate than a sociology essay. It is both a mirror and a window. A thoughtful exploration of what our humanity means. How it can be tested, broken, defiled and yet, somehow survive. It is a feat of empathy, an invitation to never ressort to black and white thinking. A song of hope, splintered but alive.

“I am so high I can see over the hills and into the mountains. A whole world stretches beyond this place : a world where life runs like steam engines and love crackles like leaves frosted with the dawn.”

The Enchanted
272 pp
Published February 2015
by HarperCollins
and in 2020 as a Harper Perennial Olive edition