Incarceron- Catherine Fisher

Incarceron- Catherine Fisher

Publisher: Dial
Age Group: Young Adult
Pages: 448 pages

Genre: Dystopian

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Imagine a living prison so vast that it contains corridors and        forests, cities and seas. Imagine a prisoner with no memory,       who is sure he came from Outside, even though the prison has    been sealed for centuries and only one man, half real, half           legend, has ever escaped.                                                         
Imagine a girl in a manor house in a society where time has been forbidden, where everyone is held in a seventeenth century         world run by computers, doomed to an arranged marriage that appals her, tangled in an assassination plot she both dreads and desires. One inside, one outside. But both imprisoned. Imagine a war that has hollowed the    moon, seven skullrings that contain souls, a flying ship and a wall at the world's end.                                       
Imagine the unimaginable. Imagine Incarceron                                                                                                                              

                                                                                                      

Incarceron is a prison unlike any other you’ve ever heard of before.  It’s a whole world onto its own.  A world that has been sealed off from the outside for generations. No one comes in and no one ever gets out (or so the prisoners think). Outside of the prison is the Realm. I world permanently and deliberately trapped in the past. 

The story is told in a dual narrative (which I love). First there is Finn. The prisoner trapped in Incarceron whose only memories prior to waking up one day all alone in a cell, are vague, fleeting flashbacks brought on by seizure like episodes. Finn swears that he was born outside of the prison even though pretty much everyone he knows thinks he’s crazy for it.

On the flip side there is Claudia, the daughter of the Warden of Incarceron and destined to be Princess of the Realm. Claudia is trapped in a falsely created world bound by the “protocol” imposed on the people of the realm by the ruling Monarchy. The reader soon realizes that Claudia is just as much of a prisoner as Finn.  I must say that as the story progressed I became convinced that the Realm was more of a prison than Incarceron. 

Catherine Fisher had the extremely tough job of creating two completely different worlds for the reader to explore. Honestly these two worlds couldn’t have been more different from one another. I actually found that I was more interested by the Realm and trying to figure out what exactly was going on there than I was Incarceron. The Realm is described as an old fashioned Victorian(ish) era world, although throughout the book Fisher hints at the fact that the whole place is just an illusion neatly hiding all the advanced technology underneath.  Incarceron is revealed to the reader as a dark, artificially created, self-contained and self-supporting world. With Incarceron Fisher makes sure the reader knows that the prison is beginning to show its age and like most prisons it is a cruel and vicious place. What’s worse though is that fact that Incarceron is alive, and it is always watching.  Survival is day to day accomplishment in Incarceron. 

Like I said, being able to create and fully develop two totally different worlds is not an easy task to undertake in just one book, and when I finished it there were definitely a lot of unanswered questions in my mind. However, from what I’ve heard the sequel (Sapphique) answers a lot of them, so I’m really looking forward to reading it and learning more about these two fantastic worlds.

This book has so many things that guys will enjoy. Incarceron is a rough and tough world full of fights, battles, non-stop adventures, and endless mystery. This one really gets the imagination going. It’s not all roses and lollypops. It’s dark, it’s twisted, and its ending is not what you would call a fairy tale one. And in my opinion that isn’t what the majority of guys are looking for a story anyways.

Even though I don’t rate the books I review here on the GUYde, this one gets top marks from me and is highly recommended for the guys out there.