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:

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 very 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.
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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/ ( )