By Justine Hyde
FICTION
Big Time
Jordan Prosser
University of Queensland Press, $34.99
Australian screenwriter, actor and filmmaker Jordan Prosser’s psychotropic vision of a near-future, politically divided Australia erupts off the page in his debut novel, Big Time. States have been renamed, borders redrawn and controlled.
The Federal Republic of East Australia (FREA) is a “culture-snuffing kleptocracy” replete with all the hallmarks of a dystopia: gulags, curfews, regressive contraception laws and sweeping police powers. The history books have been rewritten to celebrate the FREA’s colonial past, and critics of the regime, including writers and artists, mysteriously disappear. Dial-up modems and government-issued servers host AusNet, a restricted version of the global Freenet. A 10-foot wall from Kununurra in the north down to Eucla in the south, separates the FREA from a seceded west with its sky bridges, modern tech, international cuisine, designer clothes and multicultural populace. Acid-rain, floods and searing temperatures afflict the continent.
The sting in the tail of Jordan Prosser’s debut novel will divide readers.Credit: Sarah Walker
The novel’s anti-hero, Julian Ferryman, plays bass for an indie band, the Acceptables. After a year away in Colombia following the huge success of their debut album, Julian returns to Melbourne to record the band’s sophomore album and to flee the country after accidentally killing an Irish tourist.
While Julian craves a break-out solo music career, infamy comes from his unique drug-taking talent. A new designer drug, “F”, has evolved in FREA labs. The highly sought-after liquid hallucinogen, administered via eye drops, allows users to skip forward in time. Julian is particularly adept at seeing further into the future than most, and he’s hooked, but is seeing forward in time a gift or a curse?
Big Time is action-packed and high satire.
The omniscient and intrusive narrator of Big Time is “enabler” and band hanger-on Wesley, who laments that “the task has often fallen to good people, sidelined by history, to tell the stories of those lifted up by dumb luck and circumstance”. Wesley is an unreliable chronicler of the band’s misadventures as they tour their new album, a radical departure from the “limpid indie nü-pop” of their debut.
With its incendiary lyrics and abrasive edge, the band is firmly in the sights of the FREA government’s Department of Internal Borders and Immigration. Charismatic frontman Ash, guitarist Xander and his brother, Pony, drummer Tammy with hair “dangerously close to white-girl dreadlocks”, and Skinner, the band’s bald, sweaty, ex-fascist manager, live out every band on tour trope of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Julian’s ex-girlfriend, Oriana – the band’s “Yoko” – has now hooked up with Ash, and supplies the band members with ample F, but abstains herself.
Meanwhile, we get glimpses of life outside the FREA. Time itself is weaponised, becoming a globally coordinated perceived threat after an “extreme coincidence” is discovered by an Argentinian expat football fanatic in Glasgow, and the “Heaven tapes” are recorded in Tokyo by a doctor using F to treat a terminally ill cancer patient, who sees beyond death to an afterlife. It turns out that heaven is a shopping mall that never closes ... or is it?
Prosser’s action-packed riot of a novel is high satire. In the FREA, you can get hauled away to a labour camp for listening to contraband Phil Collins vinyl records. Local content on television is exclusively “footy tipping, home renovation, paedophile hunting, docudramas about single-term prime ministers”. There are radio ads for “Big Brock Burger’s new Spicy Anzac Sandwich and Fully Loaded Federation Fries” and a thinly veiled cameo by the former Franco Cozzo store in Footscray.
But don’t laugh too easily. The Big Time landscape is uncomfortably plausible in a country founded on a settler-colonial heritage, in a world submerged in late-stage capitalism that is lurching to the political right, and in the full throes of a climate crisis. As the narrator says: “Whatever’s bad about it now was there before. It just became the law of the land.”
The sting in the tail of the novel will divide readers: Prosser’s sleight of hand will equally dazzle and frustrate. Either way, this debut, with its tribute to pop music’s power to change the world, is a rollicking ride told by a master storyteller.
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