The Town
Shaun Prescott
Faber and Faber, £12.99
Review by Nick Major
SOME novelists think their books are vessels for the untold stories of the world. Where history has forgotten a place or a people, the novel can pick up the story. The narrator of Shaun Prescott’s novel arrives in a non-descript Australian town with the intention of writing a book ‘about the disappearing towns of the Central West of New South Wales.’
When he realises ‘it is impossible to write a book about
already-disappeared towns,’ he starts writing about the town where he lives. In a bizarre yet inevitable turn of events, his town starts
disappearing too. First, huge black holes open in the ground. Then, a
mirror-like hole appears, and the citizens watch their own
dissolution. It soon becomes apparent that the town and its people do not want their story told. In fact, they do not believe there is a story
to tell.
The citizens are proud of their home, but it is a pride rooted not
in a shared history or culture, but in an irrational and violent sense
of self-importance. When the narrator asks the librarian about the
town’s past, he discovers there is not much to discover: ‘There was no founder, there was no strange or noble history that the people could marvel at. The earliest recorded memory of the town was that lots of cattle died during the drought of the 1930s.’ As for the present, the place is a corporate emptiness. It is full of fast food chains, department stores and empty bars.
When he is not writing, the narrator stacks shelves in Woolworths. He also collects stories from residents, like the bus driver (there is
only one), who still drives his route, even though he has no
passengers. These are often the best sections of the novel. The
characters lead futile lives that revolve around doing the same
actions again and again. Yet Prescott never fails to make them
entertaining. The narrator’s history is shady and elusive. When
his friend Ciara asks him where he is from, he spends a long time
thinking it through. ‘I tried to trace the highways east and west of
the town in my mind, but my memory faltered at the shimmer. I could see the fields of canola but not the roads, and I vaguely remembered sadness in the shallow hills and burned-off paddocks. Thinking deeper, I could sense evidence of contempt inside me that I no longer understood.’
An eerie sense of violence pervades Prescott’s fictional world. Maybe the residents' collective amnesia and hatred of outsiders is a way to suppress the brutal origins of Australia’s colonial past. But this is a hard novel to pin down. It is impressive, funny and frustrating in equal measure. Prescott’s recursive and ironic prose style leads me to guess that it is a clever existential farce. Like so much of life, the events that unfold in The Town have no rhyme or reason. Come to think of it, this is a pretty pointless novel. Perhaps that’s why it’s so good.
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