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 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.
“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.
“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.”
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.
