from the editor's desk
Review of ‘Audition’ by Pip Adam
Adam, Pip. Audition. Giramondo Publishing, 2023. RRP: $29.95, 224 pp, ISBN: 9781922725462.
Julia Garas
Audition, Pip Adam’s fourth novel, is about our current punishment-based justice system and an argument for the abolition of prisons presented through the strange and unsettling lens of bizarre fiction. Adam has previously authored Nothing to See (2020), The New Animals (2017), which won the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction, and I’m Working on a Building (2013), as well as the short story collection Everything We Hoped For (2010), which won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction. The narrative for Audition is informed by people Adam has met during her time spent at prisons facilitating writing workshops for inmates.
The novel opens with a continuous conversation between three giant beings, Alba, Stanley and Drew, who are together on a spaceship. We quickly discover that these beings are forced to keep talking and making noise to stop themselves from growing any larger and to ensure that the spaceship keeps moving forward. But, already, they have become uncomfortably constricted and are quickly outgrowing their confines. This is the first of six lengthy chapters, and it is a bewildering opening, throwing the reader right into the middle of a complex narrative. Their strange, winding conversation compels you to keep reading though, in an attempt to untangle questions such as, who these giants are, why they are in space and why they had to leave Earth.
Described by some as uncategorisable, Audition holds elements of science fiction and speculative fiction, alongside those of social realism—the latter recognised through the shared memories and discussions Alba, Stanley and Drew come to have. In the second chapter, we start to get glimpses into what is going on as the narrative moves back in time to describe what happened prior to the spaceship being launched. Here, it becomes clear that the giants’ journey into space is not one of discovery or exploration, but a form of punishment and exile from mainstream society and the non-giant beings on Earth. Alba, Stanley and Drew’s existence as giant beings, different from regular-sized humans, acts as an analogy for the social position of prisoners in our current punishment-based justice system and for how their crimes seemingly situate them as inherently different to the rest of the population.
This distinct othering is explored through gruelling depictions of homophobia, transphobia and sexual assault that the characters seem to tolerate with an unsettling indifference, seemingly developed from being disempowered time and time again: ‘Generally, other people explained her back to herself. Her mother told her she was fat. The teachers told her she was trouble’ (116). These giant beings have no opportunity for a second chance, no matter how much they grow.
Further chapters provide more background on Alba, Stanley and Drew. We learn where they come from, how they’re connected and the distressing things they have done and have been forced to live through. Much of this knowledge comes through the representation of traumatic memories that attempt to narrate experiences most would deem unnarratable. The giants recover their memories through dialogue with each other, and reveal shared experiences of violence, imprisonment and disadvantage; they are hesitant to discuss these issues and experiences at first, with many conversations ending before they have even begun. As with trauma, these events are not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, and thus it relentlessly impacts the lives of those who experienced it, often effecting linear temporalities. This is very much felt by the giants when Alba says:
Time is doing strange things, but we feel it has been a long time. The present is refracted through the stories from the classroom which we are not telling properly. The real time goes on one second after the other, but the stories make real time fold and loop and tangle. (46)
The above-mentioned classroom is where the giants find themselves prior to launch, which remains a space of uncertainty in their memories that has deeply impacted them. It is presented like a re-education centre post-incarceration where they are taught about their future role on the soon-to-leave ship but also where they are taught compliance within a system that then seemingly abandons them.
The novel does end with a sense of hope, even if it leaves many questions unanswered. Adam holds the complexities of our present punishment-based justice system while Alba, Stanley and Drew unexpectedly arrive in a new place that provides them a sense of safety, peace and opportunity which they have been denied for a long time. With this new place comes a second chance that didn’t seem possible before.
Julia Garas is a PhD candidate at Curtin University researching contemporary Australian literature and television. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from the University of Western Australia.
