Pandion: Book Club Suggestions
[Spoiler Alert – It would be best NOT to read these questions before finishing the book]
1. Secret Gardens: Some novels are set in buildings or properties that become almost characters in the story. In The Secret Garden, a novel by Frances Hodgsen Burnett that was adapted into a memorable MGM movie in 1949, the discovery and nurturing of a hidden garden encapsulates the development of the young characters. In Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The House of the Seven Gables, the sins of one generation are visited upon another in a haunted New England mansion “once ranked among the best edifices in colonial Massachusetts,” until the arrival of a young woman from the country breathes new air into moldering lives and rooms. In The Lake House, by Kate Morton, much of the story—and the mystery—revolves around a house set in an “abundant English garden in Cornwall on a secluded lakeside estate…naturally resplendent with rhododendron, foxglove, bluebells, boxwood, ivy and creeping phlox, so beautiful and fragrant it overwhelms your sense of sight and sound and smell.” Pandion is in significant part set on a family compound on the southern coast of Maine. Writing the story I came to feel almost as if I had spent my summers at Pandion. Is it a legitimate and evocative literary tool to use a house or place as a character? Did the Pandion property—or any other settings in Pandion—feel real, or even familiar? What fictional setting in literature has stuck with you as a place you feel you’ve been or would like to visit? Have you got a Secret Garden?
2. Canine Billing: In Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend an inherited Great Dane stands in for the heroine’s departed friend, and also joins her in mourning. Love and grief are captured in the growing bond between woman and dog. Novels such as Jack London’s White Fang and Call of the Wild are told from the perspective of dogs. In Pandion Atti’s Australian shepherd Ghost plays a substantial role in the plot. Did you sense any inner Ghost world? What did you learn about the human characters by how they interacted with Ghost?
3. Sins of the Father: Hugo Forester was a criminal. He got his start by stealing cash and gemstones and leaving a man to die on the beach, and later he defrauded everyone he knew. Hugo paid for this malfeasance with a fiery death and a legacy of treachery. But is there justice in what Crane says about a son sharing the sins of his father? Does it matter that the son grew up with wealth and a sense of entitlement enabled by those sins? Was that his fault? Did Atti in the end atone for his father’s crimes?
4. The Atticus Arc: Atti starts out as an awkward fourteen-year-old, then by seventeen he learns the world is his for the asking. Three years later Atti suffers tragedy upon tragedy and must grow up fast to protect himself and what’s left of his family. Is his story arc believable? What in the younger Atti signals his ability to rise to the moment when it matters most?
5. Cell Privacy and Blocking: A recent news story reported that actors have become hesitant to appear nude of stage because so many audience members have cell phones. Cell Block, one of the inventions Lloyd Prescot’s team seeks to market, disables mobile phone functions in a performance venue or museum. Is this a legitimate use of technology? Does such a device offend your notion of privacy or personal freedom? Would it be legitimate and reasonable for a performer to not only ask but ensure the audience lives in the moment of a performance without the distraction of electronic devices?
6. Hitchcock: Hugo Forester banned television at Pandion except for an eclectic collection of DVDs, in particular movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This led to a Forester family game of pop quizzes about Hitchcock films and a thread running through Atti’s thoughts, keyed by real-life prompts like the Statue of Liberty and Grand Central Station. Atti comments to Q about what Hitchcock could do with the scene where the gun master hands the excitable Harry Gooden a shotgun. Atti’s romantic fantasies take Jordan through an assortment of “Hitchcock blonde” roles. Were you familiar with the Hitchcock references in Pandion? Did they add to or distract from the story?
7. Family Values: Atti grows up in a family that provides every material luxury and imposes few obligations other than to follow Hugo’s few strict rules. Atti senses his mother has had to make sacrifices and worries this makes her give up too much of himself. He feels oppressed by his older brother Bode, though he suspects all little brothers may feel that way. How do the events in the novel affect Atti’s sense of family?
8. Riddle me This: Riddles are common in mystery novels. In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco builds his monastic medieval mystery around codes and ciphers and a labyrinthine library that is a riddle itself, and his monk detective concludes that riddles seeming to state lies can be facts disguised as jokes. The title of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code signals the story will revolve around riddles that require a symbolist and cryptologist to unravel. In Pandion, Lazlo Crane taunts the Foresters with clues to his identity, and later with a riddle phrased in Greek mythology that maps out his vengeance. Is the posing of riddles a legitimate/effective storytelling technique or a tired trope of the mystery genre?
9. What has Love Got to Do with It?: At 14 Atti is afraid of girls, but he soon embraces his brother’s advice to use his father’s name to get what he wants from the opposite sex. In college he determines to start over without relying on his family wealth and over two years becomes comfortable meeting women and dating. But then disaster hits and he is no longer rich or even a student, and once again he has no success finding romance—albeit not for lack of trying. At what point did you think Pandion, among other things, was a love story? What did you think of the ending?
10. Casting Call: Imagine casting “Pandion the Movie.” Who would you consider for the roles of Atticus, Elle, Q, Lazlo Crane…?
11. Genre Bending: In what genre would you classify Pandion? Is it a mystery, a thriller, a romance, a coming-of-age novel, or something else? Does this label matter beyond as a marketing tool? Should novels cross genres or should they stick to the rules of one type of story?