‘Audition’: Giant Confusion

Audition, the new novel by New Zealand writer Pip Adam, feels like an allegory. Some people suddenly start growing into giants. We don’t know why. They are, perhaps through medication or habituation or both, becoming stupider, more forgetful, and more placid. They are shot into space in a ship they call Audition but, we eventually find out, is really called The University of Whispers. When we meet them on page one, they have grown so large they can no longer move because they have filled up the available space in the ship. Noise, and frequency of conversation, seems to affect both The ship’s drive and the giants’ growth.

Reading this first section of the book feels like listening to a podcast through a duvet. The style is not an accident, but a literary choice that Adam has made to illustrate, perhaps, the cognitive difficulties of the three protagonists — Alba, Drew, Stanley. The conversations on the ship between wedged in idiot giants are intriguing mainly in the curious repetition of utter banalities. Instead of the urgency, clarity, and struggle we might expect from them in the face of their emergency, the giants evince a vague sense of regret and utter a series of banal refrains including: “They made a beautiful job of the ships.”

Adam is no noob and is aware of the thin line between providing the reader with performative opacity and symbolism on the one hand and just frustration on the other. And, by and large, she’s successful at piquing our interest in the past and future of this unpromising trio. Indeed, literary judges have recognized that and before its publication in the United States, New Zealand shortlisted Audition for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards before making it to the longlist for the 2025 International Dublin Literary Award.

While the first part of this three-part novel deliberately obscures the past — remaining deep in the giant’s confusion — the reader wants to know more. Though our sense of what is happening gradually unfolds, the reader is subject to much of the same planned covering up of the past and the current situation that is brainwashing the giants. While these giants are in “classrooms” unlearning their old selves and training, ostensibly, to become astronauts, they and their teachers repeat meaningless sentences and platitudes. The teachers—poorly-paid project hires—can reset them by saying “What would you know?” And the teachers repeatedly do exactly that.

Eventually the giants got to space in ships where, it seems, they are unnecessary cargo. They perhaps have to talk to fuel the ships — but their (and consequently our) understanding of anything to do with the running of their craft seems severely limited. To operate the ship, they cluster in threesomes around six possibly identical consoles doing possibly duplicative, possibly unnecessary, or possibly vital things. But why the rest of humanity would go to the expense of training them and then sending them off on ships is unclear.

Audition is, unsurprisingly, concerned with how noise, hearing and conversation work (with a heavy hope that the protagonists do indeed pass the audition of their first life to find a better life. The shorter second and third sections present some history and future to the plot. Their “teacher,” the clear, disgruntled Torren, who understands that however much it seemed like they were friends, recounts some: “She was a handler and they were the captives.” The Torren sections are easier to read because they are more in keeping with our assumptions, but the rest of the book continues to be challenging both conceptually and stylistically. Though it never veers into coy or pretentious, it often refuses to give up simple facts, or to allow that facts can be simple.

“It’s more complicated than that. If they stay one hundred years, say, and it never rains and then they die and the next day it rains, does it rain here?”

Adam mostly tells the story from Alba’s point of view; we hear how she, Drew, and Stanley have history, including around a women’s prison. Ironically, given that her name means white, the train of events in that part of the story begins wit Drew calling her “white trash”–the “white” of which she objects to: “she wasn’t white, it wasn’t that simple. And to have Drew call her that… was just too much.”

The disturbing, unpleasant account of that prison era makes it feel like the rest of the book is Alba’s dissociative response to the trauma of being both victim and perpetrator in a society that trains its members to be either or both. Faced with the deep inequities and the violent carceral logic of late capitalism what else is there to do but fantasize about transforming your alienation into being aliens on a new planet? Alba has no better strategy than taking “mouth rape” as a cost of seeing her visitors. So she creates a story about a journey to the stars and planets that meet invading ships with “soft white fluff” where their threats are simply “disbelieved away”.