Audition
by Pip Adam
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"A genre-defying novel-part science fiction, part social realism-from one of the most powerful voices in New Zealand literature today. A spaceship called Audition is hurtling through the cosmos. Squashed immobile into its largest room are three giants: Alba, Stanley, and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing. Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley, and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their former show more selves-experiences of imprisonment, violence, and disempowerment. Pip Adam's transcendent new novel sets its eye firmly on our current justice system and asks what happens when those in power decide someone takes up too much room?"-- show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Real Rating: 4.8* of five
The Publisher Says: A genre-defying novel—part science fiction, part social realism—from one of the most powerful voices in New Zealand literature today.
A spaceship called Audition is hurtling through the cosmos. Squashed immobile into its largest room are three giants: Alba, Stanley and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing.
Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their former selves—experiences of imprisonment, violence and misrecognition, of disempowerment and underprivilege.
Pip Adam’s uncategorisable new novel, part science fiction, part social realism, asks what happens when systems show more of power decide someone takes up too much room—about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Like Stand on Zanzibar a half-century ago, this story is making a point along multiple fronts of effort. Stylisically it's resolutely avant-garde, modernist, and uses that tradition of liberation from centuries old linear narrative convention to oppose itself as completely as possible. Oppose from what? That verb needs a subject!
It takes the opportunity to set oppositional positions to, well, modernity; the way the modern world steadily relentlessly inexorably shrinks the essential liberty, autonomy, self-determination of Humanity. This is a powerful theme to pursue. It leads into some dark meditations on confinement.
It is most evidently a story in support of the anticarceral abolitionism gaining ground among progressives. More quietly it enables, encourages, examination of the ways individuals accept labels and thus limitations, even when the labels aren't very good fits. It's not foregrounded the way opposition to the carceral state is. It's there for you to consider.
I enjoy novels that expect me to bring my own ideas and knowledge to bear on reading them. I enjoy being asked to hold a thought more than a page or two before the thought pays off, hooks into another thought to make a distinctive picture. It is a pleasure to be exercised and entertained and experience elucidation of a viewpoint while immersing oneself in lovely phrasemaking.
I think that, in its compactness and its rhythm, carries more than surface meaning. Alba's is a point of view I think many could and should attend to. Her sense of...wrongness...is it all external? Is it self-recognition without self-acceptance? Is Alba...are Drew and Stanley as well...forced to keep talking as the means of propelling their starbound prison moving away from Earth in order to get their pasts out of their heads? What does the taking up of physical space have to do with the implied relationship to psychic...emotional...space? All the way into eternal exile and utter Othering in order to get permission to be ecstatically oneself. A price paid without any kind or sort of reward is rare, if one becomes an other self in response to it. A different self, an intentional self, a truthful self.
The ending of this story offers that future of selfness to the giants. It's not found the way a lot of readers will be comfortable with. But if you can read about people told they are too much for this world being thrust out of that world by being squashed into sealed containers and hurled into lethal vacuum, you really should look at why this particular ending bothers you (if it does..I found it the most liberating part of the story).
Pip Adam is a writer who reckons with ideas in her fiction. It's not always clear to me that I'm on the same train of thought as she is. That is, for me as a reader, very interesting and gives a dynamism to the words I'm reading. I experience the need to consider, "did I read that sentence and change my view of the story I thought I was reading by Pip Adam's design or my own?" very involving.
It's a story I felt repaid my attention with well-honed ideas I'd had in duller forms before that. I'd wished, during the read, for...ornamentation...flourishes...a bit of zhuzhery. I can't say the directness of prose was unpleasant or uninvolving, so I can't call it a flaw. I can say that me, reader me, the id that devours Story, wanted it; so I can't offer a perfect five but I can't take much away from that height. It's a cruel place to land:
Pip Adam made it. show less
The Publisher Says: A genre-defying novel—part science fiction, part social realism—from one of the most powerful voices in New Zealand literature today.
A spaceship called Audition is hurtling through the cosmos. Squashed immobile into its largest room are three giants: Alba, Stanley and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing.
Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their former selves—experiences of imprisonment, violence and misrecognition, of disempowerment and underprivilege.
Pip Adam’s uncategorisable new novel, part science fiction, part social realism, asks what happens when systems show more of power decide someone takes up too much room—about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Like Stand on Zanzibar a half-century ago, this story is making a point along multiple fronts of effort. Stylisically it's resolutely avant-garde, modernist, and uses that tradition of liberation from centuries old linear narrative convention to oppose itself as completely as possible. Oppose from what? That verb needs a subject!
It takes the opportunity to set oppositional positions to, well, modernity; the way the modern world steadily relentlessly inexorably shrinks the essential liberty, autonomy, self-determination of Humanity. This is a powerful theme to pursue. It leads into some dark meditations on confinement.
It is most evidently a story in support of the anticarceral abolitionism gaining ground among progressives. More quietly it enables, encourages, examination of the ways individuals accept labels and thus limitations, even when the labels aren't very good fits. It's not foregrounded the way opposition to the carceral state is. It's there for you to consider.
I enjoy novels that expect me to bring my own ideas and knowledge to bear on reading them. I enjoy being asked to hold a thought more than a page or two before the thought pays off, hooks into another thought to make a distinctive picture. It is a pleasure to be exercised and entertained and experience elucidation of a viewpoint while immersing oneself in lovely phrasemaking.
Alba searches around her body and there is not an ounce of homesickness. She misses nothing. She was born into the world and it was not happy to see her. This isn’t her home. She doesn’t want to take advantage or be any more of a burden than she already is here. They hadn’t asked her to come, she hadn’t asked to be there. It isn’t a welcome—it’s an extremely advanced form of attack and defence.
I think that, in its compactness and its rhythm, carries more than surface meaning. Alba's is a point of view I think many could and should attend to. Her sense of...wrongness...is it all external? Is it self-recognition without self-acceptance? Is Alba...are Drew and Stanley as well...forced to keep talking as the means of propelling their starbound prison moving away from Earth in order to get their pasts out of their heads? What does the taking up of physical space have to do with the implied relationship to psychic...emotional...space? All the way into eternal exile and utter Othering in order to get permission to be ecstatically oneself. A price paid without any kind or sort of reward is rare, if one becomes an other self in response to it. A different self, an intentional self, a truthful self.
The ending of this story offers that future of selfness to the giants. It's not found the way a lot of readers will be comfortable with. But if you can read about people told they are too much for this world being thrust out of that world by being squashed into sealed containers and hurled into lethal vacuum, you really should look at why this particular ending bothers you (if it does..I found it the most liberating part of the story).
Pip Adam is a writer who reckons with ideas in her fiction. It's not always clear to me that I'm on the same train of thought as she is. That is, for me as a reader, very interesting and gives a dynamism to the words I'm reading. I experience the need to consider, "did I read that sentence and change my view of the story I thought I was reading by Pip Adam's design or my own?" very involving.
It's a story I felt repaid my attention with well-honed ideas I'd had in duller forms before that. I'd wished, during the read, for...ornamentation...flourishes...a bit of zhuzhery. I can't say the directness of prose was unpleasant or uninvolving, so I can't call it a flaw. I can say that me, reader me, the id that devours Story, wanted it; so I can't offer a perfect five but I can't take much away from that height. It's a cruel place to land:
It’s a strange feeling to know that they will never have to explain this to any of their kind. They will never return. They had been sent to die. That’s clear now. Maybe they had been sent to take over this world, as some kind of front guard or maybe no one that sent them could imagine this. But they are lost to their own world now. They don’t belong where they have have come from and they don’t belong here. They are the only ones of their kind who will make it.
Pip Adam made it. show less
Pip Adam is a New Zealand author who is now published in Australia by Giramondo Publishing — an excellent arrangement which allows Australians easy access to her ambitious and thought-provoking books.
She is also one of the most exciting contemporary authors there is.
I've just been re-reading my review of the first of her books that I've read. It's called The New Animals (2017), and in the light of her preoccupations in Audition, this paragraph about Doug, a pit-bull terrier used for a photo-shoot, is prescient:
Audition is about how the justice system fails both the people who are incarcerated and the people outside who want to feel safe. In the press release from Giramondo, the author note says that it's an argument for the abolition of prisons and our present punishment-based justice system. Pip Adam explains more about it in this article at Stuff.
It is years since I did HSC Legal Studies and learned about the four purposes of the justice system: protection for society; deterrence; rehabilitation; and reparation, and how only the first of these purposes is effective — and that's only for as long as the perpetrator is locked up. Times have changed since then, and now there are said to be more 'purposes', with retribution given high priority. (The Australian Law Reform Commission has a useful summary here,) But still, we know from research that criminals come out of gaol cleverer at crime than they were; that 'deterrence' has no effect on crimes of passion or loss of impulse control; that what passes for rehabilitation programs doesn't prevent recidivism; and that no conceivable reparation can make up for the most heinous of crimes. We know that 'getting tough on crime' doesn't reduce crime. None of these realities affect the Law-and-Order auctions that are a feature of state elections.
But you know, when you've been a victim of violent crime, it can be a struggle to remember the research and be reasonable. Sometimes it's a moral struggle and sometimes, you simply feel a visceral response.
Plus, we know that there are some people who really are an ongoing danger to society...
So Audition made me feel ambivalent about its preoccupations even before I started reading it.
***
In the Stuff interview, Pip Adam gave this response to a question about how she pitched the book:
Yes, Audition begins with three giants who are squeezed into a spacecraft. They have to keep talking to keep the spacecraft moving, and silence makes them increase in size, a danger to themselves and each other. The effect was so powerful I had to conquer my claustrophobia to read it. Seriously. Confined spaces, even fictional ones, give me vivid nightmares.
Truth be told, though I do understand why Audition was written as a space opera, I did not really get on with the spacecraft elements. But Audition is a brilliant book all the same. It's what the giants talk about that makes it a brilliant book.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/07/16/audition-2023-by-pip-adam/ show less
She is also one of the most exciting contemporary authors there is.
I've just been re-reading my review of the first of her books that I've read. It's called The New Animals (2017), and in the light of her preoccupations in Audition, this paragraph about Doug, a pit-bull terrier used for a photo-shoot, is prescient:
Doug represents all the people who are used, and tossed away afterwards, and who fight back with violence because life makes them indifferent to human affection and careless about the property of others. It’s a veryshow more
confronting image which will stay with me for a long time.
Audition is about how the justice system fails both the people who are incarcerated and the people outside who want to feel safe. In the press release from Giramondo, the author note says that it's an argument for the abolition of prisons and our present punishment-based justice system. Pip Adam explains more about it in this article at Stuff.
It is years since I did HSC Legal Studies and learned about the four purposes of the justice system: protection for society; deterrence; rehabilitation; and reparation, and how only the first of these purposes is effective — and that's only for as long as the perpetrator is locked up. Times have changed since then, and now there are said to be more 'purposes', with retribution given high priority. (The Australian Law Reform Commission has a useful summary here,) But still, we know from research that criminals come out of gaol cleverer at crime than they were; that 'deterrence' has no effect on crimes of passion or loss of impulse control; that what passes for rehabilitation programs doesn't prevent recidivism; and that no conceivable reparation can make up for the most heinous of crimes. We know that 'getting tough on crime' doesn't reduce crime. None of these realities affect the Law-and-Order auctions that are a feature of state elections.
But you know, when you've been a victim of violent crime, it can be a struggle to remember the research and be reasonable. Sometimes it's a moral struggle and sometimes, you simply feel a visceral response.
Plus, we know that there are some people who really are an ongoing danger to society...
So Audition made me feel ambivalent about its preoccupations even before I started reading it.
***
In the Stuff interview, Pip Adam gave this response to a question about how she pitched the book:
When I’m asked to talk about this book, I often find it easier to talk about the ideas behind it rather than the machinery of the book itself. The book is largely an essay or a thought experiment that explores alternative forms of justice. In order to do this, I believe I needed to create a new or alternate world. If I tried to imagine alternatives in a world that resembles this one too much I would have found it too hard to escape the entrenched power structures. I also think I probably mentioned it was about giants and a spacecraft.
Yes, Audition begins with three giants who are squeezed into a spacecraft. They have to keep talking to keep the spacecraft moving, and silence makes them increase in size, a danger to themselves and each other. The effect was so powerful I had to conquer my claustrophobia to read it. Seriously. Confined spaces, even fictional ones, give me vivid nightmares.
Truth be told, though I do understand why Audition was written as a space opera, I did not really get on with the spacecraft elements. But Audition is a brilliant book all the same. It's what the giants talk about that makes it a brilliant book.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/07/16/audition-2023-by-pip-adam/ show less
What a weird, strange, beautiful book. I would rate it higher but I hated the ending. Really didn’t like it. No spoilers, sorry. (Hated it!)
Nearly gave up in the first third but it does get better
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Author Information
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Pip Adam is a New Zealand author of the book, The New Animals, which won the Acorn Foundation Literary Prize in 2018. Her work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies in New Zealand and overseas. In 2012 she received an Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award and her first book Everything We Hoped For won the New Zealand Post show more Best First Book award in 2011. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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