The night before I write this review, a new TV show catches my eye. I’m a Virgo features Cootie, a 19-year-old giant living in contemporary America. Hidden by his family, he longs for the outside world, but to keep him safe, his father has told him lies about what’s beyond the front gate (that if young black men don’t have jobs, they go straight to jail), and some truths (that being a giant will lead to him being treated like a freak, possibly killed for science).
It’s a timely coincidence that Audition, Pip Adam’s fourth novel, explores similar territory – using tropes from folklore to examine how society treats people who don’t fit the mainstream idea of humanity. We’ve seen it in films like Ali Abbasi’s Border, which drew on stories of trolls to comment on the refugee crisis, but also in Adam’s own work, specifically the brilliant Nothing to See, in which women who have endured trauma and addiction became their own doppelgängers. In that novel, the world looked the other way rather than question why there were now two versions of the same person. Adam deals inventively in characters who don’t fit the shapes society has cut out for them.
In Audition, Stanley, Drew and Alba are human giants in a not-too-distant future. How did they become giants? Nobody knows; they just started to grow one day. As the novel opens, they are in “this very beautiful spacecraft called Audition and [they] are all lucky to be inside her” as it heads away from Earth. To keep the ship moving, they have to talk; if they stop talking, they keep growing, and they are already uncomfortably too big for the rooms they are in. So they talk. The first quarter of the novel is that conversation – all dialogue, with no interior thoughts – as they try to remember the circumstances that brought them here and tell the stories of their lives before “the classroom”. Have they been fed a series of fictions?
Some of these stories will be familiar: New York in the fall; making a wish to be 30 at a 13th birthday party; Come on, Dover, move your bloomin’ arse … The section has the absurdist feel of Waiting for Godot. The dialogue makes little sense in the moment, and the giants keep repeating key phrases that are troubling, about how lucky they are, how beautiful the ship, how stupid they are, and how kind their teachers.
As usual, it’s hard to talk about a Pip Adam book without giving things away. If you are craving a straightforward narrative, this is probably not the book for you. If, however, you want an immersive experience, a slow unpuzzling and reworking of what you know and what you think you know, this novel will challenge and enthral you.
The disturbing truth of the characters and their situation is slowly revealed to us as the novel progresses in sections, only one of which shifts tone and resembles realism in the traditional novelistic sense. The giants are deliberately homogenous for a large portion of the book until they start to come into individual focus – a personality trait here, a glimpse of a tattooed arm there – and it takes such a long time because they don’t know who they are. As we get glimpses, so do they.
If you’re someone who reads acknowledgements before the book, you will have the central premise explained to you: “This book is about the abolition of prisons and our present punishment-based justice system.” Adam has taught creative writing to people living in prisons for a number of years, so this is a world she knows. The book has some insights into cycles of violence and how the current penal system doesn’t solve them: “There was always violence … They had all been prey to it and they had all perpetuated it … She couldn’t work out for the life of her how to stop it, it seemed like some sort of perpetual-motion machine or like the place was driving it.”
Adam highlights the complex relationship between victim and perpetrator: “They knew each other better than almost anyone.” Her main character, Alba, who has perfected the “remorse act”, knows she is capable of doing terrible harm even after years in prison – that hasn’t changed her. Adam doesn’t offer her characters the traditional redemption arc.
Back in the spaceship, another tonal shift occurs as the giants reach a final destination and start to remember. Fans of Adam’s The New Animals will perk up here: we are entering similar primordial territory to the final section of that book, when Elodie enters the ocean.
It’s best at this point to enjoy the experience. The rest of the book reminds me of some great science fiction that has come before, and sends me back to rewatch Jodie Foster’s climactic scene in Contact. I think of the cosmic landscapes of Alex Garland’s adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. Of Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (filmed as Arrival), which, through an alien encounter, rethinks language, time and space. But mostly, I think of A Wrinkle in Time, with Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which showing Meg how the universe can’t be perceived in human ways: “It was she who was limited by her senses, not the blind beasts, for they must have senses of which she could not even dream.” When Meg asks what her planet is called, Aunt Beast sighs, “Oh dear … I find it not easy at all to put things the way your mind shapes them.”
Closer to home, Adam acknowledges the conversation with Anne Kennedy’s narrative poem The Time of the Giants, where “the giants went on a ship which in those days / was a way of going to heaven / or hell depending”. But the ships are dashed against the rocks: “and if you look out / you will see how the giants / became the long bodies / of the headland”. Alba recalls, “we must have looked like some mythic new shape on the hill. A new peak or a new range.”
Although Aotearoa has some world-busting science-fiction authors (Tamsyn Muir and Sascha Stronach, for example), not many other writers, apart from Whiti Hereaka perhaps, are stepping so far out of the expected structures and scaffoldings of the traditional novel while also being embraced by the literary establishment (The New Animals won the Acorn Prize; Nothing to See was shortlisted). Adam disproves the theory that the “conveyor belt” from the IIML creative writing school to Te Herenga Waka University Press is producing a homogenous canon.
On one level, reading the strange and wonderful Audition is like listening to a concept album of experimental music that samples the familiar and turns it into the uncanny, where each track builds on the last until finally the listener floats off on an ecstatic bed of epic electronica. Rather than emulating what has gone before, it adds to a cumulative understanding of realms outside our ken, and asks us to critically examine our society – our systems, our prejudice and our violence – by imagining worlds beyond our own.
Audition, by Pip Adam (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35).
