CANR
WORK TITLE: THE TOWN
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BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://shaun-prescott.com
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COUNTRY: Australia
NATIONALITY: Australian
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Studied at Charles Sturt University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Crawlspace magazine, former editor. Has also worked variously in call centers, car-washing centers, and in data entry.
WRITINGS
Contributor of stories and articles to journals and periodicals, including the Lifted Brow, the London Guardian, and Meanjin. contributor of video game articles to PC Gamer, TechLife, and APC magazines; has also published the short fiction “Erica from Sales” and “The End of Trolleys.”
SIDELIGHTS
Shaun Prescott is an Australian writer who lives in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. He served as the editor for Crawlspace magazine and has contributed stories and articles to journals and periodicals, including the Lifted Brow, the London Guardian, and Meanjin. Prescott frequently writes about video games and the gaming industry, contributing to PC Gamer, TechLife, and APC magazines.
In an interview in the Wheeler Centre website, Prescott reminisced on the most surprising thing that he has heard from those who have read his writing. He admitted that “it’s usually surprising that some people enjoy my writing. When people say ‘I liked what you wrote’—that is always surprising to me. I don’t think I’m being overly modest. I think many writers must feel this way. Reading requires a certain commitment that is a big ask in this day and age.”
In the same interview, Prescott shared his views on whether or not creative writing is something that can be taught. He opined: “More so than learning how, I think some people with the desire to do so should be taught that they can and should write. Encouraging people with the strong desire to do so is important, especially if they aren’t surrounded by people who tell them, from a position of authority, that they’re great all the time.”
Prescott published his first novel, The Town, in 2020. A nameless narrator wishes to write about the towns in the Central West of New South Wales that are shrinking and eventually disappearing, and so he sets himself up in one of these small towns to research his topic. He befriends the local radio station DJ but finds that the town’s inhabitants aren’t particularly friendly with one another. The local librarian has no idea about the town’s history. The bottomless holes that start to appear around town and swallowing up its residents offers metaphorical commentary on the plight of towns like this.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews admitted it is “no small feat to conjure up a town in fiction solely through what it lacks, but the place is hard to settle into.” The same reviewer found the story to be “a conceptually ingenious if chilly dystopian yarn.” A Publishers Weekly contributor observed that “Prescott brilliantly captures the disconcerting effect of a town’s changing storefronts, people, and customs on the newcomer.” The same critic acknowledged that this novel is “a strong start” to his career as a writer. Writing in the London Guardian, James Lasdun queried: “Do these ideas catch fire, dramatically, in the way the best speculative fiction does? Perhaps not quite—the human element is a little thin, even allowing for the fact that the book is partly a portrayal of societal enfeeblement. But it’s an engaging, provoking novel nevertheless, intelligently alive to its own metaphorical possibilities, and leaving behind a powerful vision of the world ending, not with a bang, but a whimper.” In an article in the Quietus, Robert Barry reasoned that “The Town is a book about small towns that paints a picture a picture of the grinding malaise of small town life that might be recognisable to people more or less anywhere in Europe or North America…. But it’s also a book about Australia and about the hole left in history by the trauma of the country’s founding.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Guardian, (London, England), August 15, 2018, James Lasdun, review of The Town; August 16, 2018, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, “Shaun Prescott: ‘Australians Were Born of Genocide and We Can’t Erase That.'”
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2019, review of The Town.
Publishers Weekly, December 23, 2019, review of The Town, p. 78.
ONLINE
Edinburgh International Book Festival website, https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/ (January 20, 2020), “A Safari of the Existential Dread on Which Australia Is Built.”
Quietus, https://thequietus.com/ (September 22, 2018), Robert Barry, “Small Town Boy: An Interview with Author Shaun Prescott.”
Wheeler Centre website, https://www.wheelercentre.com/ (August 7, 2017), “Guest Post by Shaun Prescott.”
Shaun Prescott: 'Australians were born of genocide and we can't erase that'
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
The first book interview
Books
His debut has been hailed as ‘an uncanny masterpiece’. The Town’s author explains how the eerie setting of his novel is rooted in his background in small-town Australia, and the elusiveness of what that means
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett @rhiannonlucyc
Thu 16 Aug 2018 12.50 BSTLast modified on Fri 17 Aug 2018 11.38 BST
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Shaun Prescott
‘I think it might be more menacing than expected’ … Shaun Prescott. Photograph: Rachel Alice
The unnamed town at the heart of Shaun Prescott’s debut novel is a nondescript place, filled with shopping malls and petrol stations, supermarkets and parking lots. It is surrounded by “tentacle roads”, patrolled by a bus that no one ever boards. There’s a radio station with no listeners, and a pub with no customers. A highway leads out of the town, but when the narrator – also unnamed – walks down it, the outside world appears unreachable. “It was only possible to see the full extent of the town if you spent many years there,” he notes. “Only then could you see the barriers shimmer at its edges, and know what the edges meant.”
Nothing ever happens in this town, people tell the narrator, who is a writer researching vanishing settlements. They can’t understand why he is trying to write a book about it. At first, we don’t really understand, either – but underneath, a weird underbelly is lurking.
The Town by Shaun Prescott review – a powerfully doomy debut
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The Town was published in Australia by small press Brow Books to great acclaim, and is now published in the UK by Faber. In person, Prescott is polite and unassuming, exactly as you’d imagine an author whose first novel was published by a not-for-profit small press. He’s softly spoken and has not given many interviews. “I’m really bad at talking, which is why I write. I’m fairly inarticulate in speech,” he says.
His novel, however, is being touted as an “uncanny masterpiece” and “a stunning reincarnation of the existentialist novel”. Another review declares: “This novel signals its author as someone who understands what literature is for.” (Good lord, I think.) Comparisons have been drawn with Calvino and Kafka, Borges and Márquez. How does that feel?
“It’s pretty weird,” he laughs. “I don’t think that people are saying that I am as good as them or anything like that. Kafka is my favourite writer. The Castle is undeniably a blueprint for me. Every longer novel that I have tried to write has always started with the arrival of someone in a town. Who is doing it and why has varied dramatically, but that novel had a huge effect on me. I’m happy that people recognise that I am in love with Kafka. It’s true.”
Prescott grew up in Manildra (population: 485) in New South Wales (like his novel’s nameless town). He was the first person in his family to go to university, and studied journalism. He worked for a music magazine and now writes about video games, commuting into Sydney from his house in the Blue Mountains a few days a week. Despite no longer living in Manildra, the town still loomed large in his imagination.
The point of books is that you open them and anything can happen. To limit it in any way just seems counterproductive
“I always desperately wanted to leave, as teenagers often do,” he says. But his dreams still take him back.
The town is identifiably Australian, but in another sense it is an everytown with which many of us can identify. It’s what the cultural theorist Mark Fisher might have called “boring dystopia” – a place embodying the banal melancholy of late capitalism, culturally flattened and emptied of history. Yet the concerns underpinning the narrative are specifically Australian.
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“I was interested, on the one hand, in myself and the obscurity of my family tree,” explains Prescott. “I don’t actually know who I am in terms of the nationalities that are in my blood. That holds true for most of the settler cultures in Australia. Everyone wants to be Australian, but no one really knows what that is. And the truth of what it is nowadays is actually quite bleak and horrible.”
Prescott is firm when he says that he did not want The Town to be didactic. It manages not to be, while at the same time hinting at small-town ignorance and violence, the fear of the other that arguably underpins some of the resurgent white nationalism seen around the world. “All visitors were vague threats, distant and unchallenged,” the narrator notes. “Those who arrived from the city were not to be trusted, while those who arrived from further inland were suspected of possessing a more authentic claim to country life than anyone in the town.” The novel also contains a satirical streak, made more amusing by the narrator’s deadpan delivery and failure to pick up on social cues. He lives in regular terror of being “bashed” by thugs and watches the townspeople engage in petty acts of destruction: “It was a yearly ritual to destroy a bulk of the park’s facilities after the mayor’s speech, Jenny explained. After a full day of drinking in the sun, it was the only gesture that people could muster.”
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It’s funny, I say. “I think it is,” Prescott agrees. “I amuse myself, anyway.” A friend’s mother threw it in the bin because she thought it was miserable, he says: “I think it might be more menacing than expected. I didn’t think it was that menacing while I was writing it. I find the narrator really funny. He’s got this cute precocious seriousness about him that I really adored inhabiting, because I’ve been there. I’m probably still there.”
The cluelessness of the narrator is amusing: in a knowing hint to authors everywhere, he keeps boring people about his book, blithely unaware that no one is interested. He is told by the town’s librarian: “Nothing of note has ever happened in this town, and by the time it does, there will no longer be any point in remembering it.”
Except, of course, it has. “To claim that nothing has happened in a town in the central west is an obvious lie. There were a lot of frontier wars and violence against Indigenous Australians,” Prescott says. “So it obviously does have a history but no one knows what it is because there is a real dearth of information about non-urban Australia.”
The country’s white nationalists, he says, are “very violently opposed to the idea that Australia could be anything but great. Potentially the frustration is born of the understanding deep down that none of that is actually true. We were born of colonial violence and genocide and there is nothing that we can really do to ever erase that.”
Prescott’s setting embodies that collision between buried trauma and the nondescript banality of small-town life, and the nature of his concerns as a writer is perhaps why his prose is lacking in that specific, fashionable austerity that is so typical of Anglo-Saxon writers.
That’s not to say Prescott’s writing is florid – it is remarkably pared back, but contains a mischievousness and imagination found in the best continental writing. Among Prescott’s favourites are Hungarian authors László Krasznahorkai, Ádám Bodor and Ágota Kristóf; he likes their willingness to banish realism. “The culture of writerly advice, particularly on social media, really makes my skin crawl,” he says. “The point of books is that you open them and anything can happen. To limit it in any way just seems counterproductive and hateful to literature.” It’s a refreshing stance. And, if this weird novel is anything to go by, one that will work out pretty well for him.
The Town is published by Faber, priced £12.99. It is available from the Guardian bookshop for £10.99 including free UK p&p.
Shaun Prescott
Shaun Prescott
A safari of the existential dread on which Australia is built.
Shaun Prescott is a writer based in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. He has self-released several small books of fiction, including Erica From Sales and The End of Trolleys, and has been the editor of Crawlspace Magazine. His writing has appeared in The Lifted Brow, The Guardian, and Meanjin, among other places, and The Town is his debut novel.
A radio station broadcasts tapes to an audience of none; an ex-musician drives a bus that no-one ever boards; a publican runs an empty hotel with no patrons. When a writer arrives in this New South Wales town to research vanishing Australian settlements, he is plunged into an abyss of weirdness from which he – and the town itself – might never recover.
An uncanny masterpiece, Shaun Prescott's debut novel The Town is a stunning reincarnation of the existentialist novel and a haunting excavation of historical trauma. Magnetic, strange, and absurdly slippery, this is a portrait of oblivion from Australia’s answer to Lynch, Calvino, and Kafka.
Small Town Boy: An Interview With Author Shaun Prescott
Robert Barry , September 22nd, 2018 10:29
Shaun Prescott's debut novel, The Town, has been compared to Kafka, Italo Calvino, and Kōbō Abe. Robert Barry met up with him to talk ghost towns, erased pasts, and "strange / weird / beautiful / repugnant Australian music”
Photo credit Rachel Alice
Across the Central West of New South Wales, there are settlements disappearing. Towns that once were there are no longer. In their wake, they leave behind “very little evidence,” Shaun Prescott tells me. “But you can see their names often on Google Maps.” Places like Green Valley, Tambaroora, and Sofala leave behind a shadowy, virtual existence. Ghost towns, haunting the web like the Facebook profiles of friends who have passed away.
“There’s one in particular called Meranburn, which was on the outskirts of a very small town that I grew up in called Manildra,” Prescott recalls. “And I remember just looking – because I’m obsessed with maps in general – and I remember just looking in the area and seeing this name Meranburn. I didn’t know what it was, what the name meant, why it was there.
“But I did discover through a private press history book that I found in Manildra not long ago now that Meranburn was actually bigger than Manildra at some point. It was a proper settlement. Small, but a settlement nonetheless. Which had deteriorated completely once the post office moved from Meranburn to Manildra. That’s just one anecdote. There’ll be many dozens more.”
Prescott’s new novel, The Town is about a man living in an anonymous town in the Central West who is, himself, writing a book about disappearing towns, about the disappearing towns of New South Wales’s Central West. And then that town, the town he’s living in, starts itself to disappear – like, literally. Before his eyes. Shimmering holes, like windows into the void, gape on the high street.
The town that is the subject – and in a sense the main protagonist – of The Town, like many small towns, is a town without a future. But it is also a town without a past. As the narrator’s research turns increasingly towards his own habitat, none of his co-citizens seem to know the origins of the town, why people settled there, nor why. They seem actively to not want to know.
The book’s origins lay in its author’s own suddenly awakened interest “in the town where I grew up, Manildra, which is a lot smaller than the town in the book. It just occurred to me one day that I didn’t know why it was there. I didn’t know how people, why people had settled there.”
A small community of scarcely 500 inhabitants, Prescott moved to Manildra with his family when he was still a child and spent the rest of his childhood there, only leaving, aged 19, for the slightly larger regional centre of Bathurst, not far away. Born in the western suburbs of Sydney, the family initially moved out to the country for a mixture of both financial and health reasons. “My dad suffers asthma,” Prescott explains, “so he needed the clear air. Ironically enough, we managed to move to a town with the largest flour mill in the southern hemisphere, which was only growing and growing. Nowadays, when you go to Manildra, it towers over the town. But that’s the reason we ended up there.”
He grew up a “massive reader”, but confined mostly to reading genre fiction, wading through boxes full of supermarket crime fiction handed down by his grandparents. It was Franz Kafka’s unfinished masterpiece The Castle that proved the gateway drug to harder stuff. “That blew my mind,” he recalls now. “Every time I read it, it’s different.”
Even as a child, he was always writing fiction. But for most of the 00s, Prescott’s only published writing was for Crawlspace, a website he edited “mostly about strange / weird / beautiful / repugnant Australian music” (as it says on the now-defunct site’s About page).
Some of the most evocative scenes in The Town are about music. The local radio DJ Ciara who invents myriad fictional groups playing a practice organ through a reverb pedal; a strange band called the Out of Towners who played music that was “alien, remote, like nothing else the audience had ever heard” using just two guitars and a recorder.
But what stays with you is the book’s slow conjuration of a place at once very specific, and totally anonymous – like Kafka’s own Village in The Castle.
“The Central West of New South Wales is kind of the first rural farming area in Australia,” Prescott tells me. “So there are lots of instances of towns popping up and then disappearing. Lots of train stops that the train no longer stops at but they still retain their platform, and things like that. And that aspect of me being interested in a place that I’d spent a very long time in, a sudden curiosity that had never occurred to me before, dovetailed with a broader concern with the hidden aspects of history – in Australia in general, but particularly the Central West.
“According to most Australians, the Central West is mostly untouched by war. But British invaders did murder plenty of aboriginal Australians en masse. They were actual wars. Frontier wars. None of which is common knowledge to Australians. It’s certainly not something that I ever learnt at high school.”
In the acknowledgements at the end ofThe Town, alongside the usual thanks to friends, family and editors, Prescott adds, “This book is set predominantly on the land of the Wiradjuri people, to whom I pay my deepest respects.” It’s a timely reminder – and a hint towards what lies behind that municipal amnesia. “That’s why the town’s folk believe they have no history,” Prescott says – because that history is too bloody to confront.
So The Town is a book about small towns that paints a picture a picture of the grinding malaise of small town life that might be recognisable to people more or less anywhere in Europe or North America. “The same branded restaurant outlets and the same branded clothing outlets and the same plaza companies and the same supermarkets.” But it’s also a book about Australia and about the hole left in history by the trauma of the country’s founding.
“That history hovers inevitably across an Australian novel. And if it doesn’t then I’m not sure if it’s particularly valid. If a novel is going to question Australian identity in any form, then it’s going to haunt the story. And if it doesn’t, then I don’t know what’s going wrong.”
The Town by Shaun Prescott is published by Faber
Guest post by Shaun Prescott·In Fiction·Monday, 7th August 2017
Working with Words: Shaun Prescott
Shaun Prescott writes fiction and non-fiction. He's the former editor of Crawlspace and his writing on games, music and culture has appeared in the Guardian, Meanjin, PC Gamer, the Lifted Brow and more. Shaun spoke with us about day jobs, Kafka and the thrilling release of his new novel, The Town.
Photograph of Shaun Prescott
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
It was a poem, published in the Charles Sturt University student magazine Interp. I was 19 at the time. There are 19-year-olds who are excellent writers but I was not one of them.
What’s the best part of your job?
Fiction writing for me is not a job – I do it during my evenings. For my day job, I write about video games for PC Gamer, TechLife and APC magazines. The best part of this job is that it's by anyone's measure a good job. The job comes with its pressures and deadlines and occasional annoyances, but I am still surprised to call it 'a job'. Before that I worked at call centres and car-washing centres and data-entry jobs, so I can barely believe my luck.
Cover image of the book 'The Town' by Shaun Prescott
What’s the worst part of your job?
The worst part of writing about video games is that sometimes it's difficult to muster the levity needed to write about Crash Bandicoot. The worst part of writing fiction is the dread and self-doubt. And the feeling that all the threads you've gathered together are coming unstuck. And the feeling that it's a ridiculous indulgence, for a person like me to write something and hope for a reader.
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
When I was nearing the end of a particular draft of my novel The Town, I emailed Sam Cooney for feedback. I was scared to solicit this kind of feedback because reading drafts of novels by non-friends is not a priority for busy people, but I knew Sam had read my self-published stories and I had written for the Lifted Brow before – and because this was the first novel I had written that I still felt positive about while nearing the end, I emailed him. His agreeing to read it was significant, but his eagerness to publish it was even more significant. Writing novels is the only thing I cannot rule out in my life aside from being a father and helping make a living with my partner Rachel, so I cannot overstate the significance.
Good books are good advice; bad books are bad advice.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
Most of the advice that has been useful to me hasn't been direct, it's things I've gleaned from reading other writers. Good books are good advice; bad books are bad advice.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself?
It's usually surprising that some people enjoy my writing. When people say 'I liked what you wrote' – that is always surprising to me. I don't think I'm being overly modest. I think many writers must feel this way. Reading requires a certain commitment that is a big ask in this day and age.
If you weren’t writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
I don't know, virtually anything. I don't have any other vocation, but I'm sure something would have popped up.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what’s your view?
More so than learning how, I think some people with the desire to do so should be taught that they can and should write. Encouraging people with the strong desire to do so is important, especially if they aren't surrounded by people who tell them, from a position of authority, that they're great all the time. If we only have writers who can afford to have someone teach them to write, then that doesn't seem positive to me.
As for the finer details of how to go about teaching creative writing, I'm sure there are useful lessons to be learned and meaningful activities to carry out. It surely depends on the teacher.
As a primary school aged kid in rural NSW, the writer Jackie French visited my school and she invited me to send her my primary school aged stories. I would send them, and she would return them with feedback – feedback that was not pandering. Maybe if this never happened then I might have dropped the desire to write somewhere along the way. It would be nice if all writers could somehow be this person for someone else.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?
It's possible that the writers we need the most in this age are those who simply can't.
One semi-truthful piece of advice people are always dishing out is that to write, one must actually write. And this is true, even though many people who should write probably find it impossible to make the time to do so. Even a simple piece of advice like this can be more complicated than it seems. It's possible that the writers we need the most in this age are those who simply can't. Being able to write and having the time to do so, even after sacrificing pleasures, is far from a guarantee. So for those with the time and who are actively writing, being aware of this and working with that knowledge in mind seems like good advice to me.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
Both. I only read books digitally if it's the only format available.
If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why?
Probably Harold Skimpole from Bleak House, because although he's a total boor in that novel, it sounds like he would be a good laugh for just one evening. I could drink a lot of beer without worrying that I'm the one drinking more than everyone else. Also I'm terrible at having conversations with strangers.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
It's probably a dull answer and many will groan at how typical it is, but The Castle by Franz Kafka is without a doubt the answer. My friend at university, Kathryn, one year gifted me a copy for my birthday and she probably doesn't realise the sinkhole it would open.
I don't know if the things I love about Kafka are the significant things. His novels are so dream-like and strange, but I have rarely laughed as hard as I have at The Castle. I read it every couple of years, and each time I have forgotten huge sections of it. Not because they're boring, but because they belong to a different plane of logic that can't be anticipated even by those familiar. I would like to know this novel intimately one day, but it might be impossible.
The Town is available through Brow Books. It will launch at Better Read than Dead in Sydney on August 10, and at Readings in Melbourne on August 24.
Prescott, Shaun THE TOWN Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Fiction) $26.00 2, 4 ISBN: 978-0-374-27852-6
A writer goes searching for vanished Australian communities in this dark allegorical debut.
The (fittingly) nameless narrator of this novel has a notion to write a book about the "disappearing towns of the Central West of New South Wales," so he arrives in a (fittingly) nameless community to conduct his research. But what's to investigate? Commerce seems restricted to a Woolworths and a bar nobody patronizes; the annual community get-together always degrades into fisticuffs; Ciara, the DJ at the local radio station whom he befriends, suspects nobody is tuning in; and the librarian has no history to point to. In some ways the novel can be read as a kind of lament for a disappearing sense of community and willful ignorance of the past; the nameless town is what you get when you have an infrastructure (homes, roads, train lines) but no sense of a social contract. But the narrator's (and Prescott's) affect is so cool that it resists characterization as a critique or satire; the novel at times recalls the slacker-lit of Douglas Coupland, all emotional blankness and deep skepticism about humanity. The novel gets something of a lift in its latter portions as the narrator's friendship with Ciara deepens (though, pointedly, the relationship remains platonic) as they try to find out who's sending cassettes of eerie music to the station. And when seemingly bottomless holes begin appearing in town, the novel acquires a kind of deadpan comedy as the town begins to swallow up its own: "Then [the holes] started to consume furniture, and thoroughfares, and places where people might sometimes want to stand." It's no small feat to conjure up a town in fiction solely through what it lacks, but the place is hard to settle into, as a metaphor or anything else.
A conceptually ingenious if chilly dystopian yarn.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Prescott, Shaun: THE TOWN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A608364738/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d917084d. Accessed 13 Jan. 2020.
The Town
Shaun Prescott. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-0-374-27852-6
Prescott debuts with a promising allegory of an Australia in cultural and economic flux. An unnamed narrator moves to the Central West of New South Wales, planning to work on a book about rural towns in the region that have "simply disappeared" from the landscape along with the people who lived in them. After renting a room and getting a job in a grocery store, where he plays back dictations of his work in progress, vaguely planned as a hybrid of journalism and horror, the narrator befriends his roommate Rob's girlfriend, Ciara, a DJ with a late-night slot at a community radio station. Her feedback on the narrator's book ("She couldn't tell whether the book was fiction or fact") echoes questions that are sure to emerge from the reader. As bottomless holes start appearing throughout the town, people and buildings begin to vanish, the cost of goods increases, and civic order unravels. Ciara, who's broken up with Rob, plans an escape with the narrator. While the ephemeral details wear thin ("As the town disappeared, so did my grip on any particular town truth"), Prescott brilliantly captures the disconcerting effect of a town's changing storefronts, people, and customs on the newcomer and Ciara, offering stark reflections on the young characters' search for a sense of definition and pet manence. Prescott is off to a strong start. (Feb.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
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MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
"The Town." Publishers Weekly, 23 Dec. 2019, p. 78. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A610340143/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7346a71a. Accessed 13 Jan. 2020.
The Town by Shaun Prescott review – a powerfully doomy debut
Australian towns are disappearing in a thought-provoking novel that ranges from the banal to the apocalyptic
James Lasdun
Wed 15 Aug 2018 09.00 BSTLast modified on Wed 15 Aug 2018 09.47 BST
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‘Technically it’s still possible to drive off, but most attempts end in failure.’
‘Technically it’s still possible to drive off, but most attempts end in failure.’ Photograph: Fairfax Media/Getty Images
The sense of some deeply melancholic encounter haunts the pages of Australian writer Shaun Prescott’s winningly glum debut novel, aided by elegiac musings on belonging and estrangement, growth and decay, places and voids, portals and dead-ends. An unnamed writer arrives in an unnamed town, rents a room, finds a congenial cafe and a tolerable pub, and starts to write a treatise on “the disappearing towns of the Central West of New South Wales”. Like much about this simultaneously realist and absurdist novel, that word “disappearing” hovers at the line between the figurative and the literal. Are these towns merely in decline or are they literally vanishing? Both, it would seem, and before long, circumstances suggest that the one the writer has settled in is itself disappearing. He adjusts his focus accordingly, chronicling the local process of entropy as it unfolds around him, in ways that range from the banal to the apocalyptic.
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At the realist level, The Town scrupulously catalogues the physical desolation of places that have lost whatever purpose they once had but drift on out of habit, an enervating dreck of shopping plazas, petrol stations, ring roads, littered parks and fast food chains. And as the writer gets to know various individuals around town, so this desolation begins to acquire a human face.
Almost all these characters are studies in failure of one kind or another. There’s Tom, the ex-musician who drives the town bus on which nobody ever travels. There’s dim, truculent, small-minded Jenny, who runs the failing pub. There’s the xenophobic town bully, Steve Sanders, rumoured to be spoiling for a fight with the writer. There’s Rick, who seeks nothing loftier than a job at a supermarket but gradually surrenders to bong-induced lassitude. There are crowds of nameless teens and townsfolk who spend their days getting drunk and stoned and then brawling or vandalising the place.
The town may have seen better days, but suddenly no one can remember them – or indeed anything else about its history
The one possible exception to the general haplessness is Ciara, a DJ at the community radio station (which of course no one listens to), who at least has yearnings for a more vivid existence, and whose job opens up an interesting theme of music as a conduit to richer realities. She and the writer strike up an ambiguous friendship that provides some tension, though in keeping with the book’s fastidiously low-key affect, it doesn’t go anywhere decisive.
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A gentle, deadpan comedy of listlessness prevails. Everything partakes in it. People get drunk till they reach a state of “aggressive sadness”. Houses are mysteriously abandoned. Businesses downsize and close. The town starts to resemble “a depressed country [music] festival suspended in a 2am lull”. The prose itself mimics the general sense of dwindled options: “Usually I ate boiled spiral pasta with grated zucchini and mushrooms. Sometimes I would also add cheese.”
Occasionally someone tries to leave, and it’s here that the book’s absurdist DNA starts to reveal itself. There’s a station, but trains no longer stop there, and most of the roads that ought to lead out in fact end in cul-de-sacs. A forbidding shimmer lurks on the horizon. Technically it’s still possible to drive off, so we’re not quite in the realm of The Prisoner or The Truman Show, but most attempts end in failure. The people making them are struck by terrible misfortunes or else, as in Sartre’s Huis Clos, they open the doors of their respective hells only to find they can’t summon the will to step out.
As the metaphysical weather darkens, so this state of inertia extends not only through space but also through time. The town may have seen better days, but suddenly no one can remember them – or indeed anything else about its history. The narrator realises that he, too, is beginning to forget where he came from: “I tried to trace the highways east and west of the town in my mind, but my memory faltered at the shimmer.” And not just the past but the future – all eternity – seems threatened by the encroaching paralysis. As Sanders, the bully, declares in a splendidly bizarre scene in which he materialises in quadruplicate: “This is how things are going to be from now on. This is how they’re going to stay. History can end, you know. It doesn’t have to keep going … ”
This is an engaging, provoking novel, intelligently alive to its own metaphorical possibilities
These tropes may not be entirely original, but they’re executed with a mixture of conviction and laconic humour that gives them a fresh appeal. At one point holes start appearing all over town, some small, some enormous. People, buildings, whole blocks disappear into their seemingly bottomless depths. The fabric of reality itself appears to be eroding, but the townsfolk carry on doggedly, remarking “It’s not your typical hole” or at best “It’s probably an environmental disaster”, while municipal workers put up tape and boards, and the police mount “infrequent” patrols around them. The muted reaction captures the diminished scope of the human imagination – its hopeless inadequacy in the face of imminent extinction – with painful wit.
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Do these ideas catch fire, dramatically, in the way the best speculative fiction does? Perhaps not quite – the human element is a little thin, even allowing for the fact that the book is partly a portrayal of societal enfeeblement. But it’s an engaging, provoking novel nevertheless, intelligently alive to its own metaphorical possibilities, and leaving behind a powerful vision of the world ending, not with a bang, but a whimper.
• James Lasdun’s latest novel is The Fall Guy (Vintage). The Town is published by Faber. To order a copy for £10.99 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.