Review: Audition by Pip Adam

This mind-expanding novel begins with a conversation on a spacecraft, the Audition. Three giants, Alba, Stanley and Drew, are crammed into its corners because they started growing again. Now they are pressed up against the walls in three separate spaces, their bodies in painful contortions, the blood supply to limbs slowly cutting off:

“It started slowly,” Alba says. “Like, these things always do — aided by a healthy hope that it isn’t happening at all, a hope that kept everything at bay, made orderly decisions possible and then — it happened very quickly.”

They can converse because of the ship’s peculiar acoustics. It turns out that the ship runs on noise, and also that it was the giant’s constant talk that was keeping their growth in check. There is nothing but their conversation — no descriptive passages, no thoughts — we get to know them initially only through their own words. Their conversation is strange — they refer constantly to the beautiful make of the ship, insist that they cannot talk about their lives “before the classroom”. They finish each other’s thoughts, and all seem to share exactly the same life experiences (you might notice that some of these experiences seem to come from movies).

You immediately feel for them, these giants who believe themselves stupid and brutish, but show themselves to be anything but, and you feel for their circumstances and their pragmatic coping with them. There’s a wrongness to the happenings. They know in their hearts that their space trip is an execution, a solution to the problem of disposing their very large bodies. Every now and then one of them slips, revealing they stopped talking in protest:

Maybe if we came at it one more time something would break, like a wall under a battering ram. Wouldn’t something give if we came again at the this is the truth of things?

As the novel broadens in scope it comes at this “truth of things”, revealing who Alba, Stanley and Drew are and their relationships to each other, their lives before the spacecraft, and how they went from normal-sized people to giants. It’s a thrilling mix of sci fi and social realism, bringing to mind the pathos of Kazuo Ishiguro and intellectual rigour of Ursula Le Guinn.

As Adams writes in the acknowledgements, this is a novel about “the abolition of prisons and our present punishment-based justice systems”. It demonstrates the cruelty of such systems but also their absurdity, as if the violence of unfreedom can bring justice to victims and atonement for perpetrators. “Nothing that can be paid would make it better,” Alba thinks, “Not money or property. Not even Alba’s death. Not an eye for an eye. Only responsibility. Only carrying on.” At the start of the novel, Alba, Drew and Stanley are abjectly unfree, not just physically constrained but psychologically controlled through a series of commands that reinforce their lack of agency. Their journey into space is a journey of self-rediscovery, as they remember themselves in all their complications and contradictions, the violence and the love they are capable of.

Adams’s prose is a supple tool wielded to conjure the grim reality of prisons on Earth or the enchanting wonder of an utterly foreign exoplanet. It is full of light, humour and feeling.

Gay rating: 5/5 for queer characters, relationships and sex.