In so many crucial ways, people are defined by where they live.
It’s not necessarily a conscious thing, although there’s strong evidence that many people gravitate to a particular place such as hippies in northern New South Wales and deliberately let it inform who they are, but it is integral to their character, beliefs, worldview and a host of other things.
So what happens, argues Shaun Prescott’s The Town, when the place where you live begins disappearing around you? It may have been in decline for quite some time but when that process accelerates, and with the addition of some magical reality actually starts to blink from existence in a shimmering maelstrom of nothingness, how does it affect who you are?
Do you still belong there? Do you belong nowhere? Can you go somewhere else entirely, or will you, as the unnamed protagonist and his friend Ciara discover, be stuck in a geographical and mindset limbo forevermore?
“The town was just there and that was that. It was a bunch of people living in houses who all just got by. I should just get by, she said.” (P. 130)
Informed by Prescott’s keen understanding of the all-consuming vagaries of country life, The Town examines how people who are from nowhere else at all, and never have been – even the new arrivals like our nameless protagonist can’t remember where they come from – handle the disappearance of the only home they have ever known.
Using the device of a book-wthin-a-book – the protagonist is writing a book on “the disappearing towns in the Central West region of News South Wales” which eventually grinds to a halt when he realises the towns that would have featured have all but gone, making research and feedback from locals problematic to non-existent – The Town takes an unflinching look at small town rural life.
Everything from the annual town disco, where long-running feuds find violent, physical form to the main street-eviscerating domination of the two shopping plazas with their preponderance of big name brand stores that have no geographical allegiance of identity, the book seamlessly explores how identity is shaped by location.
There is no sentimentality to this exploration; in fact, everyone from the acerbic town publican Jenny to the bus driver Tom who drives around town on an endless route to nowhere really with no passengers to Ciara’s radio show with no listeners and no real point, seems passionately disinterested in where the town came from (save for defending the bigness of the 1930s drought), where it is going and whether they care much about it at all.
Unfortunately, replete though The Town is with some really compelling ideas and some delicious quirkiness, as a reader you may be left with much the same ambivalence.
Lacking chapters, a standard narrative or sense of momentum – save for the final 30-40 pages when matters come to a head – and any sense of emotional connection with the characters, it is a struggle to really care too much about what happens to the town or its inhabitants.
Granted, there is a deep Kafka-esque existential crisis threading its way through the whole book which accounts for the weariness of the soul vibe that suffuses the book from start, but this turns what could have been a very clever, engaging book with some very clever writing – the observational writing beautifully highlights the absurdities of country, and later, city life – into one long slog.
There’s no real lightness, no humour, no sense of anything other than unremitting existential gloom; everyone is disengaged, disenchanted, angry, ambivalent or sad; that’s great for distilling how a place can warp the soul, the central thesis of the book, but not so great if you want to feel even remotely connected to the characters in any kind of meaningful way.
“It took most of the night to walk to Ciara’s parents’ home. The holes had eaten large swathes of terrain. Whole intersections were impossible to traverse, and the roads in the old part of town could not be navigated at all. We crept through sleeping properties, some houses now skeletal, our torches aimed down at the grass in case of holes.” (P. 193)
In the end The Town, full to bursting with great ideas, observational weirdness and moments of quite poetic writing, becomes bogged under the weight of its own existential musings.
One long stream of consciousness, peppered with some quirky characters who, apart from Ciara, and man child Rick and Tom to a less extent, never quite get any traction, the book is become a turgid marathon that comes close to engaging on occasion but never quite seals the deal.
It’s by no means an awful read, but it never really fires, rambling on and on with prose so inwardly dense and naval-gazing that any observations about time and place and how it shapes our identities, are almost lost.
Almost; there’s enough cleverness and insightfulness to get you to the end of the book.
Alas, too often it feels like you’re hanging in out of sheer stubbornness, rather than any great love for the story or the characters who leave you feeling almost as weighed down and heavyhearted as the town itself.