Recent Reading: Big Time by Jordan Prosser
That this is Big Time's topic initially takes a bit of work to discern, since there's so much else going on in the novel's opening chapters. It begins, in proper gonzo fashion, with protagonist Julian Ferryman accidentally (and unknowingly) killing a man in a gas station bathroom in Medellín. "Not a local, thank goodness – even Julian wasn't that inconsiderate a tourist," the narrative is quick to assure us, thus establishing both the novel's sardonic, often deliberately outrageous tone, and the fact that Julian, despite having some limits, is still quite inconsiderate. That impression is further brought home as we learn that Julian is the bass player in an Australian pop band, The Acceptables, whose first album has been a runaway success. Julian's response to stardom was to run off to Colombia for a year, though not before breaking up with his girlfriend, Oriana. He is now hurrying back home in response to the news that Acceptables frontman Ash Huang (who is dating Oriana) has not only written and arranged all the songs in the band's second album, but is threatening to replace Julian with the lead guitarist's younger brother if he doesn't show up to record. On the plane to New Zealand, Julian befriends a flight attendant who gives him a free vial of the latest drug sensation, F, which induces in its users vivid—and often quite accurate—visions of the future.
In other words, this is Almost Famous—the aforementioned sardonic narrator turns out to be Wesley, an aspiring journalist and Acceptables hanger-on; his narrative occasionally pauses from documenting Julian and Ash's squabbles, their love triangle with Oriana, and the misadventures of the Acceptables' second album tour to point out himself, in the background of a party or the back of a tour bus—crossed with the psychedelic drug novel, and a bit of time travel to boot. That's enough to be getting on with, so it can take a moment to notice that there are some discordant notes in this narrative, ones that Wesley seems to take for granted. He doesn't pause to explain when he mentions that for Julian to return home from New Zealand requires a "repatriation flight". At a drug-fueled party on the night of Julian's return, an attendee recounting a story about his first sexual experience while on a family vacation in Batemans Bay is asked: "Isn't Batemans Bay a work camp now?"
The setting, it transpires, is not Australia but the Federal Republic of East Australia, an autocratic police state which seceded and locked itself down some decades previously. As Prosser proceeds along his tale of the rise and fall of the Acceptables, chronicling the recording of their second album and subsequent tour, he expertly dribbles in details such as a border wall across the 129th meridian, the redaction of Phil Collins albums for subversive content, and an internal internet that cuts off FREA residents from the outside world. To the Acceptables members and their hangers-on, this is the familiar backdrop of their lives, something not even worth commenting on. Like bohemians and artists since time immemorial, they put on a show of being unbothered by the restrictions of the straightlaced society around them, cavalierly listening to suppressed music and imbibing illicit substances. But an awareness runs through them of where the line between toying with those restrictions and openly flouting them lies, and how easy that line is to cross. An accident with the band's tour bus becomes a pretext for the FREA police to search the band and their entourage for prohibited materials. Suspiciously clean-cut audience members at their shows are probably agents of the Department of Internal Decency. When the party at the beginning of the novel is raided, the one attendee who did not manage to dump his drugs is carted off with a bag over his head, never to be seen again.
Stylistically, Big Time is an exuberant imitation of the sort of 70s music journalism that became almost an artform in its own right. It has a propulsive narrative force that carries the reader along circuitous, run-on sentences that veer off into cul-de-sacs of relationship drama and character backstory before depositing us safely back in the familiar tale of a band straining at its seams from artistic differences and simmering resentment. But the whole thing is inflected by our growing awareness—an awareness which is finely managed by Prosser's narrative, doling out details just when they can most destabilize our sense that we understand this story—that this is all taking place under the jackboot of fascism. What does the Acceptables' stardom mean, and what can it be used for, in that context? Do they have a responsibility to speak out about the injustices they've witnessed? Will audiences listen? Can music lead people to a greater political awareness, or are they just, as Julian insists, looking for "Three-and-a-half minutes of up-tempo bullshit"?
These questions come to a head when it turns out that Ash's vision for the Acceptables' second album is not just a departure from their upbeat pop sound, but politically dangerous, a series of protest songs and cries of rage. The conflict between Julian and Ash takes on a political tinge, and eventually becomes a matter of survival, as Ash refuses to moderate his views or acknowledge the danger he's putting the band in—as he goes on rants against the government during radio interviews, and refuses to play the band's old hits during concerts. But lest we mistake this conflict for something more consequential than it is, Julian's perspective also forces us to ask: is this music any good? Are Ash's discordant melodies, angry guitar riffs, and bizarre time signatures actually getting through to people, or are they just alienating the audience? Is the Acceptables' second album truly a work of meaningful protest, or is it, as their record label's infallible algorithm, which weighs potential government crackdown against the ability to sell the band as rebels in the outside world, concludes "The exact type of diatribe one might expect from a group of well-to-do suburbanites who made some money, felt bad about it, then dramatically overcorrected as they clicked into the real-world order for the very first time"?
This constant shift in perspective, from the white-hot heat of righteousness driving Ash to the seen-it-all cynicism of both the machine producing the Acceptables and the commentators chronicling their journey, is echoed in the fact that everyone in the band, and most of their hangers-on, are taking F, and thus semi-permanently watching their life like a movie they've seen before. Early in the novel, Julian uses his F visions to evade the dangers of life in the FREA. He warns his friends about the coming raid on the party, and reassures Ash when he becomes convinced that Julian is informing on him. But as Julian's facility with F grows, as he becomes able to see days and even weeks ahead at remarkable accuracy, the drug becomes a means of medicating away the uncertainty of life under fascism.
Julian used to rely on black-market diazepam for his anxiety, but now he liked F better. The smallest hit from one of Oriana's perfume samplers could give him a full day's peace of mind – he could be sure that there were no more standoffs with Ash in his immediate future, and if there were, he'd know exactly what to do when he got there, because he had a script. F was the drug of choice for many bands and performing artists in the FREA for this exact reason. No more nerves. No more stage fright. Nothing left to chance.
When the novel pulls outward from Julian and the rest of the Acceptables, however, it suggests that F is having a more cosmic effect on the very nature of time. Breakaway chapters move away from the main narrative to reveal a world where the familiar rules of causality are breaking down. A refugee from Argentina's dirty war flees to Scotland in his teens, and decades later watches a football game that is an exact, move-for-move replica of a game he watched with his father as a child, which triggers a global panic over the appearance of extreme coincidences. A dying woman takes F to see past the moment of her death and sees herself wandering a shopping mall, a place where she always felt safe and happy as a child. As soon as her vision becomes public, it is replicated by other F users, but is this a matter of suggestion, or have the very rules of the afterlife been altered? When the Acceptables come across a group of scientists who have been lured to the FREA for a conference on time's increasingly odd behavior, they suggest that the existence of F has broken something fundamental: "[time] knows it's being observed, tampered and tooled with. Explored, stretched and desecrated. And I think we should expect it to become more and more erratic as a result."
If this seems disconnected from the novel's other concerns, Prosser is quick to suggest that the questions raised by F's existence chime with the ones the novel asks about the power of music. Does knowing the future give one the power—or even the courage—to change it, or does it force people down a predetermined path? Do F visions reveal the future, or do they create the future they reveal? Oriana, who turns out to be an anti-FREA dissident, believes that an F vision of the regime's downfall could cause it to happen in reality. But the reactions to Ash's protest songs suggest otherwise. Perhaps, like music, people take from the visions they experience using F what they wanted when they went in, and disregard the rest.
The musical biopic is always written with an awareness of how its story turned out, but in Big Time this awareness is altered by both the presence of F, and the constant background hum of danger from the FREA's repression. The narrative often skips ahead to reveal that the Acceptables' seemingly benign musical tour is about to go off the rails, that people we have come to take for granted, even members of the band, are about to drop out of the story. Wesley cavalierly reveals that he will end up in a work camp—and indeed, he disappears from the novel's events halfway through, though he continues to narrate the novel through unknown means. The point of view continues to shift outward in space and time, traversing continents and decades as the Acceptables' tour, and its dissolution, become less and less central to the story. After all, if you take a long enough view—as Julian, with his growing tolerance and facility for F, begins to do—everything is temporary: fame, love, the boot on humanity's face.
What this widening of perspective reveals is that the question that Ash and Julian keep clashing over—does art have the power to defeat fascism—is really a matter of mistaken perspective. The answer isn't that art absolutely does have this power, or that it absolutely does not. It's that the power art has is completely unpredictable, shaped by time and circumstances in ways that are almost impossible to control. A theater manager who cuts off the Acceptables' power when the contents of their songs scares him tells his son, years later, how he barred the doors when the police tried to arrest the band and stop the show—and doesn't that story have, after all, more power to galvanize resistance than his actions in the moment did to stop it? When the story of the Acceptables' repression by FREA authorities crosses the border, they become symbols of resistance, and their first, bubblegum pop album becomes an anti-FREA anthem. It's not the artist who decides what their art means, Prosser seems to be saying; it's time. It's time, too, that topples regimes and tears down walls. Every totalitarian system that quickly accustoms us to its presence, that makes us forget that things weren't always like this, will one day be a relic whose downfall seems almost inevitable. For the people living in the moment of repression, that's hardly enough; for the heroes of this stunning, multifaceted novel, it is all that they can get.
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