I first heard about this book back in September when I saw a review of it in The Weekend Australian, and it intrigued me because The Australian doesn’t often review books from micro publishers like Brow Books. Ed Wright’s review of The Town ran to two whole columns, and it began like this:
Riffing off authors such as Gerald Murnane, Shaun Prescott builds an idiosyncratic vision that is simultaneously banal and powerfully moving. The Weekend Australian, September 6-17
So I bought a copy. Gerald Murnane is, after all, unique, so I was interested to see if Ed Wright knew what he was talking about. Since then, however, The Town has been reviewed all over the place, the SMH, the Sydney Review, and the ABR and probably elsewhere as well. That’s quite a splash for a debut novel…
But much as I love the enigmatic writing of Gerald Murnane, I suspect that for some readers, the comparison is like the kiss of death. So I am here to reassure you that The Town is not as weird and strange or abstract as The Plains to which it is being compared and I don’t think it’s like the fictions that Murnane himself describes as conceptual literature.
For a start, The Town has characters. Murnane, in A Million Windows repudiates the idea of characters, and indeed he is somewhat patronising about undiscerning readers who expect more in the way of narrative conventions. But The Town has some quite engaging characters – all of them with names except for the narrator. And in The Town, the bricks-and-mortar realism of recognisable settings littered with Woolworths and BP, Golden Arches and Michel’s Patisserie, is nothing like the dreamy landscapes of The Plains where the concept of a plot is equally foreign. Whereas I can tell you what happens in The Town, no problem.
The narrator is a wannabe author who wants to write the history of disappearing towns in the central west of New South Wales. He makes his way to an unnamed town marooned somewhere between the city (later revealed as Sydney) and the vast emptiness of the inland. He gets casual work stacking shelves in the local Woolworths, and he shares a house with Rob while he sets out looking for material for his book.
What he finds is lethargy, stagnation and inertia. Nobody knows anything about the history of the town because nothing of any significance has ever happened there. Whereas he had assumed that there must be some kind of intellectual or artistic sub-culture, everyone he meets seems banal. The disconcerting elements of this novel arise when the reader meets the fatalistic characters who signpost the futureless destiny of the town...
To read the rest of my review (and to access links to my thoughts about the fictions of Gerald Murnane to whom this author is compared) please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/12/17/the-town-by-shaun-prescott/ ( )