Pantheon

Oh, Lacunae, you have SO much explaining to do!

I finished Pantheon with an enormous number of questions, a particular fascination with Vivienne Ho, and that rather wonderful feeling that comes when an author has built something far more intricate than I initially imagined. Having already discovered Lacunae through Perpetūra, I knew I was entering the world of a writer who loves complexity. Her stories have layers, her characters carry secrets, and she has an extraordinary talent for making me question absolutely everybody’s intentions.

What I hadn’t anticipated was how much time I’d spend thinking about one deceptively simple idea: What does it actually mean to know another person?

A woman who has made herself

First, can we talk about Vivienne?

Gosh, what a fascinating woman. I have a weakness for complicated female characters, particularly those who have learned to survive by becoming extraordinarily good at controlling what the world knows about them. Vivienne Ho is intelligent, calculated, guarded and wonderfully difficult to understand. Underneath that carefully composed identity is Circe, a woman whose history refuses to remain safely in the past.

What captivated me wasn’t simply the mystery around her. It was the psychology of building a life so deliberately that the person you become feels as real as the person you used to be. How much of ourselves do we choose to reveal? How much do we conceal? At what point does self-protection become another kind of prison?

Lacunae gave me a protagonist worth examining, questioning and occasionally wanting to shake by the shoulders. My favourite kind, really.

Damien, darling. We need to talk.

Then there is Damien Tang.

Oh, Damien!

I have a complicated relationship with men who believe that gathering enough information about a woman will eventually give them the answers they want. The audacity! Yet that is precisely what makes Damien compelling to examine. His intelligence, determination, desire and questionable decisions create a psychological tension that reaches far beyond an ordinary romantic pursuit.

His connection with Vivienne raises uncomfortable questions about privacy, personal boundaries and the difference between genuine intimacy and the desire for control. When somebody becomes an obsession, can you still claim to be seeing them clearly? More importantly, can you love a person while refusing to accept that some parts of them remain their own?

You can gather facts, trace movements, discover connections and assemble an extraordinary portrait of somebody’s existence. You can still misunderstand the human being behind it. That contradiction was one of the most interesting parts of Pantheon for me.

When intuition becomes an obsession

Have you ever met someone who appeared perfectly ordinary, perhaps even wonderful, yet something deep inside you insisted that the person standing in front of you wasn’t quite who they claimed to be?

I’m talking about that inexplicable gut feeling. That little voice whispering that something doesn’t add up, even when you have absolutely no evidence to support your suspicions. Would you dismiss it as paranoia, accept the identity that person has chosen to present to the world, or begin searching for answers?

Now imagine discovering one tiny inconsistency. Nothing particularly dramatic, just enough to suggest that perhaps your instincts weren’t entirely wrong. Would you stop there?

I find this question fascinating because curiosity has a rather dangerous habit of disguising itself as something perfectly reasonable. After all, what’s wrong with wanting to know the truth? One question leads to another. One discovery creates ten more mysteries. Suddenly, the person who once intrigued you has become a puzzle you cannot leave unfinished.

You start looking for explanations in everything they say, everything they do, every little detail that previously seemed insignificant. Somewhere along the way, without necessarily realising it, your curiosity has become an obsession.

The real question is what happens to YOU when the need to discover their truth becomes stronger than your ability to walk away.

How much are you willing to sacrifice? How many boundaries are you prepared to cross? How far can you justify going before the search for the truth begins revealing something rather uncomfortable about your own character?

Perhaps your instincts were right all along. But does being right justify everything you did to prove it?

Oh, Lacunae. Now THAT is a psychological rabbit hole I could happily spend hours discussing.

The architecture of secrets

Lacunae combines relationships, institutional power, surveillance, money, identity and international intrigue into a story with an enormous moving structure behind it. I admire the ambition. You can feel the attention given to the different layers of information, and I enjoy fiction that expects me to read attentively and question what I think I understand.

There is something deeply unsettling about the way modern life scatters pieces of us everywhere. Records, transactions, contacts, places, passing decisions: individually, they may look harmless. In the hands of somebody determined enough to connect them, they become a different kind of story. Pantheon understands how disturbing that can be.

That said, at roughly 164,000 words, this is a substantial novel, and I did occasionally wish Lacunae would trust her readers a little more. Some explanations and repeated constructions slowed the experience for me. There were moments when I wanted to tell her, quite affectionately, Darling, I understood you the first time! The underlying ideas are strong enough to stand on their own. Sometimes a decision, a look or a well-placed silence can do more than another explanation.

That observation sits alongside genuine admiration for what she’s attempted. Complex books invite complex reactions, and I would much rather discuss what challenged me than pretend every reading experience is perfectly smooth.

The research behind the fiction: oh, Lacunae, did you study law?

There were moments while reading Pantheon when I genuinely found myself wondering whether Lacunae had studied law. Seriously, woman, DID YOU?

Having already discovered her work through Perpetūra, I was familiar with her extraordinary attention to detail, her perfectionism and the complexity of the worlds she constructs. Yet Pantheon made me appreciate another aspect of her writing: the enormous amount of research that must have gone into building this particular universe.

The legal reasoning, the procedures, the precision of the arguments and, perhaps most impressively, the psychology behind the characters’ professional decisions fascinated me.

Writing about lawyers is one thing. Understanding how a lawyer thinks, how they approach a problem, how they construct an argument and how their professional training influences their decisions is something entirely different.

I kept imagining Lacunae surrounded by mountains of research material, spending countless hours studying a profession in order to understand it well enough to make her characters genuinely convincing. Of course, knowing her perfectionism, I can also imagine her refusing to move on until every possible detail made sense!

There were moments when that extraordinary precision became almost too much for me. Certain explanations were so detailed, so methodical, that I occasionally wished she would allow the narrative a little more breathing room.

But here’s the fascinating part: those same passages were also among the most impressive demonstrations of her craftsmanship.

I could appreciate their technical precision even when I wanted the story to move a little faster. That is quite an achievement.

Being an author is so much more than sitting in front of a computer and inventing stories.

It’s research. It’s studying subjects you’ve never studied before, understanding professions you’ve never practised, learning how people in completely different circumstances think, behave and make decisions. It’s constructing entire systems of logic so that fictional characters can inhabit a world that feels authentic.

The finished novel might take readers a few days to enjoy. The research behind it can represent hundreds of hours of invisible work. Lacunae’s attention to that invisible work deserves recognition.

I suspect lawyers reading Pantheon will find themselves swimming in familiar waters, recognising the professional reasoning and details woven into the story. I would genuinely love to hear what they think.

Lacunae, I have just one question: how many hours of your life did you spend researching all this? Because, woman, WHAT A JOB!

Romance, heat and the psychology between them

Vivienne and Damien’s relationship is charged with desire, but the sexual tension is only one part of what makes it interesting. Romantic intensity, sexual chemistry and explicit sexual content are not interchangeable. A relationship can be physically heated while remaining emotionally complicated, and a moment of tenderness can reveal more about somebody than a far more explicit scene.

For me, the most compelling tension in Pantheon is psychological: what it costs these people to be vulnerable, what they mistake for trust and what happens when the desire to get closer collides with the need to remain in control.

What stayed with me

Freedom. That is the word I kept coming back to. The freedom to choose who we become, the freedom to decide which parts of our past belong to other people, and the freedom to love someone without handing over every last piece of ourselves.

I also appreciate that Vivienne has an identity, motivations and ambitions extending beyond her romantic relationship. Her existence matters independently of Damien, which makes their connection much more interesting than it would be if the entire book revolved around whether or not they end up together.

Perhaps that’s why I enjoy Lacunae’s creative work so much. She builds worlds that invite curiosity and seems perfectly happy to leave me with enough questions to fill an entire podcast episode.

Which is precisely what we’re going to do.

Pantheon is an ambitious, psychologically charged romantic conspiracy thriller about secrets, power and the terrifying intimacy of being truly seen. It rewards attention, invites debate and leaves room for complicated feelings about complicated people. Vivienne, in particular, is a character I’ll be thinking about long after closing the book.

Lacunae, congratulations. Your imagination is extraordinary. Your characters have given me plenty to argue about, and your latest world has left me with a formidable list of questions.

Lupe Farkas
Imperfect Rebel