Audition by Pip Adam

There is a light at the end of the tunnel (not literal) for this intolerable present I’ve been stuck in for a while, and though there grows within me a sense of relief that change is finally, potentially, likely (I hope I hope I hope I hope) to happen within the next few months, that the change hasn’t happened yet and that there is yet no guarantee continues to keep my spirits, my inspiration, my mood and my ability to plan for the next present sadly static…

I’m also, of course, worried (slightly) that whatever the next stage of my life will be could fail to be any better, but – honestly – I think that’s very very very unlikely as – for the next few years at least – I should be able to maintain a bit more control over the ways in which I spend my time (or at least how that time is organised, if not necessarily the content of that time itself…). A better time is coming, I hope.

A better time is coming, I hope.

A better time is coming.

A BETTER TIME IS COMING.

–///–

Audition (Peninsula Press, 2023; originally published in New Zealand by The Herenga Waka University Press) is possibly a brilliant book. It’s possibly a great novel. It’s almost certainly – though I’m not 100% certain, I am going to need a second opinion to corroborate or explain to me why I’m wrong – a very good one.

Initially starting off with a cracking sci-fi premise (astronauts on a rocket ship must constantly make noise to power the ship, and also any time there is a moment of silence all of the people on board get physically bigger!), the opening part is a near dizzying three way dialogue reminiscent of Beckettian or post-Beckettian experimentalist writing, which – to be blunt – I had tired of before the section finished and until I flicked forward to confirm the book didn’t maintain this format throughout I was considering a very very rare book abandonment/postponement (tho to be fair to Audition I was reading this coming off the back of an overnight transatlantic flight into a very hectic couple of days and my lover was reading a Sookie Stackhouse of which I was of course jealous)…

Thankfully (or not, if Happy Days is your happy place), Audition isn’t like that the whole way through, and I’m sure the formlessness and implied automatic speech of the three already giant-sized space travellers trying to maintain a dialogue in order to mitigate further growth would bear a re-read now I’ve read the rest of the novel and caught up on sleep (and (most) emails and wasted yet another weekend doing nothing to speed up the transition/s I need to happen in my life etc etc etc)

These people are onboard a spaceship and were selected because they had already begun growing while on earth… No explanation is given as to the reason for growth, but by the end of the novel there is a clear allegorical meaning to it: the people on Earth who became giant-sized and were thus selected for this space mission were those who were already ill-adapted slash ill-suited to late stage colonialist capitalism: the queer, the “criminal”… the loners, the losers, the disorganised, the unfortunate…

Are the giants on the ship people who have been intentionally sent as an advance and unaware attack force or does the alien world they arrive at halfway through the narrative of the book come as a surprise to the silent, uncommunicative mission control back on Earth, like it does to the giants on board the spaceship they call “Audition”? Does this even matter?

–///–

The novel, in sections that (for the first two thirds or so at least) bounce between tonally, narratively and structurally diverse settings, constructs an almost collage-like whole:

we go from the pure and complex triologue (is that the word?) of the opening, through to a more standard retelling of the setting/premise, into a flashback narrated by the morally bankrupt and depressed person who implemented (but didn’t plan or structure) the training/brainwashing the giant people experienced on Earth prior to the spaceflight, then further back into a bleak realist depiction of the carceral state and its effects on the humanity of its victims (that morphs at its end as the growing begins), then into a sequence that is a literary equivalent of the ending of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, followed by an extended evocation of a totally alien world.

Tone and language shift and move; characters change and move from sympathetic to sinister and back again with a regularity that is reminiscent of the way I do interpersonal relationships but would perhaps not be so universal for other readers (#BPDlife), but maybe not… I suppose the normalcy of anti-hero type protagonists shows many consumers of narrative are happy to empathise with the perpetuators of violence?

I think conservative readers might find this book provocative – i.e. it’s anti-prisons by and pro-queer existence and the erosion of structural power – but I’m also in agreement with Pip Adam’s perspective, so it didn’t provoke me. (Except when, sleepy post a flight, I thought I might have to try and read a whole book that was too difficult for my intellect.)

Ultimately, then, yes, I suppose it is great! Or at least I agree with it? It’s human and moving and original and unique, thought-provoking and articulate and different from many books I’ve read before!

The Acknowledgements at the end of the book are lengthy and (tho I realise that reading Acknowledgements isn’t essential, I always do)  Adam’s words there do remove a certain ambiguity from the text, but I think that’s absolutely the author’s prerogative if that’s what they want to do.

The Acknowledgements also includes a list of writers the author was reading as they read the book, which was a nice touch and one I think many other works would benefit from – the direct admission that all art feeds on other art, that what one consumes affects what one produces…

It’s a great book, a good book. I liked it.

But I could be wrong.

Order direct from Peninsula Press here.