A strange, wondrous and disquieting journey on a spaceship crewed by giants. What?
I’ve been following Pip Adam’s work ever since I met her at an infant music class in 2007, facilitated by a piano accordion player, Rebecca, who had played with the NZSO at the age of 16. We marched our babies to the in-and-out wheeze of her instrument, and sat in circles and beat small drums.
Her new novel Audition, set in a spaceship, crewed by giants, is all about noise. The spaceship is crazy with it. It is the loudest ship ever built, and the noise generates the energy to propel it. Or maybe it doesn’t – nothing is entirely explained in this novel, and we know as much as the giants who are incarcerated inside it. The noise is at an unbearable level and the giants are unable to escape it. They must talk continuously or else they will grow and the ship will burst. The title Audition has the roots of auditory in it, but perhaps the characters in the novel are auditioning. But what for? A new life in a new universe, beyond incarceration? Or are they in some kind of reality show, performing the act of piloting a space ship, when in fact an external force is in control?
One more question: Is Audition Pip Adam’s most bonkers book yet? Quite possibly so. It’s also audacious, inventive and radical, and this time round, a little hallucinatory.
The archaic meaning of the word audition is the power of hearing or listening. Alba, Stanley and Drew murmur platitudes to each other. “What would we know? The people who built this ship did an amazing job. We’re so lucky. The classroom was beautiful.” They experimented with not talking for a while, but the room they once had in the basketball court no longer exists and their legs are painfully jammed around their heads. They relate fragments of their former lives – in New York, in Alaska, in bookshops and elevators, as spies, as maids. They remember the meals they ate in the classroom: Monday, vegan superfood buddha bowl day, Tuesday Greek roasted fish with vegetables. They remember Torren, their teacher in the classroom. The prose has an incantatory feel about it. As they circle they could be singing, and this is a trait of Pip’s writing – to return to mundane details, the string of word worry beads. Later, the memories they share are revealed to be fragments from movies. In the endnotes, Pip cites You’ve Got Mail, Pretty in Pink and Maid in Manhattan as source material, among others. “The present is refracted through the stories from the classroom which we are not telling properly,” says Alba. “The real time goes on one second after the other, but the stories make the real time fold and loop and tangle.”
Once when interviewed, Pip revealed that she liked to listen to loud music in order to break her writing. To stop her from falling into familiar narrative patterns. And this might explain the structure of this novel. Just when you think that you are going to be subjected to an interminable thought experiment, forced to listen to dream-logic chitchat in extremely claustrophobic circumstances, the novel breaks and we are suddenly back on Earth, with Torren in the classroom.
Torren is a character that briefly comes into sharp relief. Five foot four, an astrophysics tutor with space travel ambitions who lost her job, she has a daughter and is now a giant minder. People are resentful that the giants are the ones who get to go to space. “Why do the freaks get to go? What was it to them? What about all the good citizens who didn’t get giant, who just did their work?” But Torren has a flickering empathy. She shows them where the ice cream is kept and recognises Stanley as one of the funniest people she knows. “The ice cream day changed something in her.” She has a feeling of disquiet about the giants’ future. They are three times Torren’s size and are sedated, brainwashable. It is her job to make them feel loved, and to glamour them into forgetting they could smash the walls that contain them. “It would be good to see them go. They were dangerous and annoying, they took up way too much space.” The classroom provides a different kind of noise – the giants are constantly talked at, and certain phrases have the power to rob them of their agency. The talking overwrites their memories so they are unable to discern their own stories from the ones they’ve been told. Torren has gone off-script and is the source of the romantic comedy back stories. And she is the one that has attributed names to the meal replacements they consume: really, they taste of nothing.
We are also allowed inside Alba’s head. Alba has done terrible things and knows that she is bad person, and yet we feel sympathetic towards her. She feels unloved and alienated, she ruminates about the mistakes she has made and the impulses she has failed to quell. We witness the broken knuckles, the lost finger and hair, the forced blowjobs she has had to endure. This close attention reminds me of Helen Garner, who once said, “I’m interested in apparently ordinary people who, under life’s unbearable pressure, burst through the very fine membrane that separates our daylight selves from the secret darkness that lives in every one of us.”
The use of size to convey a sense of unheimlichkeit is powerful. “They were odd for starters which made [Torren] feel terrible, like it was visceral how wrong they looked and the trying not to look was the other thing, the force it took to act normal and polite made her almost faint.” This, in itself, is a powerful psychological insight, but I can’t help thinking that Pip is talking about the state of bigness in general, the demands that society makes on us to fit within certain parameters, and the sense of being shut out if you don’t. I’m reminded of "I like giants", a Kimya Dawson song: “Cause all girls feel too big sometimes / Regardless of their size." It is mysterious as to how Alba, Drew and Stanley became big, but it has something to do with not being seen, and the violence that wreaks. “So much of what [Alba] thinks of herself is based on what Stanley had thought. That he had seen her and singled her out and they had been together. And this is why what she did was unforgivable. She had said that she didn’t see him.” Alba fails to recognise Stanley as a man; Drew fails to recognise Alba as a person of colour. And why has Drew grown? Perhaps there is something arbitrary and random about their collective bursting out of their clothes, their having to tie multiple prison sweatshirts together in order to cover their bulk. But this is a trait of Pip’s writing: she hints at causation but never fully elucidates. And somehow this works.
According to the acknowledgements, this book “is about the abolition of prisons and our present punishment-based justice system.” Pip has spent a lot of time teaching creative writing within prisons, and each section represents a form of imprisonment, some more brutal than others. Alba, Drew and Stanley are hurtling towards the event horizon, and according to the quoted Harvard astronomer, “The event horizon is the ultimate prison wall – one can get in but never get out.” This version of prison is peachy and dreamy. They are welcomed by a Carpenter’s song, "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft". If I caught notes of Orange is the new black in the preceding section, I sense the ghosts of A Wrinkle in Time’s Mrs Which, Mrs Whatsit and Mrs Who in this one.
The locals of the new world appear in forms that are recognisable to the giants because their true shapes would be incomprehensible. The world itself is defined by extreme comfort, and consciousness is collective. The giants find themselves clothed in the softest of T-shirts and corduroy trousers. The edges of the buildings are rounded and frilled. “There are no gates or doors on any of the buildings. There’s no demarcation between the outside and the inside. They walk through them. The colour of the light in the buildings is softer than it is outside. From inside they can see the light that the frills let in. As they shift the soundless sound the light plays on the walls and on them.” (A note on the language – the words are short, the punctuation is sparse. And yet it is poetic and hypnotic.) There is a Way Through, and they will only be allowed in as far as the world lets them. Their discomfort increases the further they go until it is almost intolerable. The world has its own immune system and there is no need for recognisable violence. Not only has Pip imagined an utopian imprisonment, she is well-versed in decolonisation, and has mapped out a best practice arrival. Alba, Stanley and Drew are not going to ravage or steal land or infect the locals with their own diseases. “They never belonged anywhere and maybe that’s why they can work with this so fully. Maybe this is why they made it through. Because they pose no threat but also make not a ripple. They will not damage a speck here.” If only I could say the same for my own ancestors.
So, what do I think of Audition as a whole? Strange and wondrous and disquieting. If I found the first section claustrophobic, I was rewarded by the subsequent sections, each one a thing unto itself. Social realism butted up against science fiction against fantasia. Each part reveals more of the mystery of the giants in a satisfyingly forensic manner. There is an air of Alice in Wonderland (also once a giant!) and the reader is left uncertain as to where the bite of the mushroom or the opening of the door might take them. But as with all of Pip’s novels, it is best to just to keep moving through the realms. A fearsome intellect underpins Pip’s work, and Audition is threaded with astute psychological insights, but there is also absurdism and humour, erotica and brain candy, and pop culture references aplenty.
“I think she’s a genius,” Steve Braunias from ReadingRoom said when he gave me Audition to review. And as reluctant as I am to apply that term, because geniuses are supposed to be anointed in retrospect, I think he’s probably right. Audition by Pip Adam (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35) is available in bookstores nationwide.
