Review: Audition
Reviewed by Ruth Spencer
Author:
Pip Adam
Publisher:
Te Herenga Waka University Press
ISBN:
9781776920785
Date published:
13 July 2023
Pages:
208
Format:
Paperback
RRP:
$35.00
Imagine the most confined your body could be. Contained in a room the same size as your body but not the shape of it, with unforgiving metal corners and walls and ceiling pressing your softer flesh into painful contortions. Your chin on your chest, a deep breath impossible. Your foot is asleep, or dead, all you know is that the cramp turned to pain, which turned to pins and needles, which then, horribly, went away. It is claustrophobia embodied, except the fear comes from knowing it will get worse if you stop talking, because talking is the only thing that stops you from growing even bigger. What would you say? Does it matter?
Audition is a spaceship. On it are three giants, Alba, Stanley and Drew. Victims of a bizarre condition that saw them grow to three times their size, they are too big for Earth; too dangerous, too unwieldy, too scary. Earth’s solution is to construct massive spaceships to send them, and the many others affected with this sudden giantism, out into space. The ships, including Audition, are big enough for the giants when they launch; the only catch is that the ship is powered by noise. As Drew explains, ‘The ship is built like a huge amplifier. So, it can get as much energy as possible from the sound... It had only been used for torture before but it worked for travel as well.’
It works for both. The giants must make noises, talk, scream, sing, stomp, to keep the ship moving and to prevent further growth. But their compliance in boarding the ships, setting off to an unknown or non-existent destination, was facilitated by a programme of sedation and brainwashing. The ship’s inhabitants inevitably rebel, a silent protest that felt powerful until the terrible consequences arrived.
Drew, Stanley and Alba don’t know if there are other survivors on the ship, others crammed into gymnasiums and hallways, spaces still just big enough to hold them, or if the others are dead, crushed as they grew too big for the rooms; they can only whisper to each other through the vents, repeating the lessons they were taught in the Classroom after their incarceration, piecing together fragments of memory they can’t be sure are theirs. ‘They really have done a nice job of the ship.’ ‘The ship is beautiful.’ ‘We are stupid.’ ‘What would we know?’
Beginning in the bleak sci-fi environment of the spacecraft, the characters of the confused and suffering giants are almost indistinguishable in their repetition of their lessons. We leave that setting several times to expand the backstory of Alba, Drew and Stanley, landing at one point in social realism. It’s a difficult, brutal and hopeless vision of incarceration necessary to ground us in the truths confronted in more metaphorical ways elsewhere in the book.
Author Pip Adam doesn’t let us off the hook with a gently haunting alien allegory of prison reform, although we get that too; she confronts us with real horrors, of violence and dehumanisation, asking us what we already condone in the interests of a society free of inconvenient people, loading them into spaceships we call prisons and hurtling them to their unknown dismal fates.
Audition, the book, is like the spacecraft Audition, a beautiful vessel in which many horrors occur. Adam has created a new way of exploring themes around imprisonment and oppression, making a sensory experience of confinement filled with restrictions and unbearable noise that drowns out thought and individuality. She also gives us a glimpse of redemption, singing a different, beautiful alternative to that inhumanity. Audition travels and lands in unexpected ways, both cacophonous and harmonious.
Reviewed by Ruth Spencer
