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At the crux of Jordan Prosser’s Big Time lies a question: Where does comfortable Australian mediocrity lead us? The novel exists in a vague future, in a world in which most of our impulses as a country to belittle and deny have been followed through to their natural conclusions. The Federated Republic of East Australia (FREA) bisects the continent with a wall, rolls back technological progress, redacts art and invents new types of cop. Queensland is renamed Cooksland, New South Wales is Botany and a work camp in Broken Hill is filling up with political prisoners. At long last, Australia is as isolated culturally as it is geographically.

Through this vision of our hermit-kingdom future we follow The Acceptables, an immediately familiar pop-rock phenomenon. They blew up with their first album; now, they struggle with their ‘difficult’ second. Tensions simmer. Expectations become burdensome. As Big Time begins, we find that frontman Ash has exploited a power vacuum by reshaping the band’s songwriting from saccharine and lyrically embarrassing (‘What time is your heart It’s a quarter to three What time is your heart Time for you and me’) to politically challenging (‘I’m not here to continue the tradition I am here to hold your hand and dance you towards sedition’). To hell with career ramifications.

The satirical throughlines that connect modern Australia to the FREA are obvious but enjoyable nonetheless. Sydney is a dilapidated maze of 3.5-star hotels and road closures (albeit one where the Enmore is still a cultural centre—some institutions withstand the dystopia!). Brisbane is a seething hive of police. Culturally, the country is mean and insular, obsessed with bush poets and Alfred Deakin. It’s fertile ground for a punk band: the FREA features real thought police to kick against! Envy The Acceptables! If someday Big Time’s proposal of Australia becomes a reality, we may hope for a similarly self-important gang of egotists to test the boundaries of The Man.

The satirical throughlines that connect modern Australia to the FREA are obvious but enjoyable nonetheless.

But it’s in Big Time’s other major plot strand that the story finds its stride. Enterprising home scientists have cooked up an illicit new substance. A drop of ‘F’ in each of its users’ eyeballs allows them to see forward through time, rapidly creating a population of people addicted to previewing the next few hours, the next few days. This meddling with the fourth dimension has wreaked havoc on the formerly ironclad laws of space-time, with associated anomalies showcased to great effect in a couple of extended vignettes.

The first of these is the story of Eleuterio Cabrera, a meticulously paced and fascinatingly detailed biography of an Argentinian man obsessed with what seems to be an exceptional coincidence. The high and low tides of Cabrera’s life as an escapee from fascism, now growing old in Scotland, imbue Prosser’s imagined world with a sense of sincerity and emotion:

He remembered being lifted up in his father’s arms, spinning so fast he thought his foot might never touch the ground again. And he remembered Temperley v Estudiantes—the third goal in the eighty-first minute—Panizo, a bow-legged, left-footed striker, accepting a perfect pass from the right midfielder and curling the ball fifteen metres into the top-left corner of the net.

This depth only augments the impact of the speculative fantasy. Other vignettes are just as effective. Beyond the dull grey of the FREA’s aggressive homogeneity, we witness the vividity of a world almost entirely indifferent to the muffled thumps of Sydney and Melbourne. We’re offered a vivid panoramic: we see the friendship of Japanese girls, whose lives diverge and intersect; the westward journey of a family of Eastern European refugees; a daughter driven to solve the mystery that had eluded her dead father. The telling of these smaller stories is intricate, methodical and heartfelt. In Olenya’s tale of flight from an advancing army, her mother tries to abandon the family dog. The sparse dialogue is strategically deployed and devastating:

Someone will take care of him, said Karina.

I will take care of him, said Olenya.

No, said Karina. Not anymore. We have to take care of ourselves.

These contained narratives show a writer with enormous empathy and a talent for rich characterisation. They also function as case studies of how the universe of Big Time has begun to come apart at the seams. The loose threads are substantial, unspooling Big Questions: Is free will a thing? What lies beyond death? What would we do if we knew exactly what our present actions were leading to? Is time linear? All that and more.

These contained narratives show a writer with enormous empathy and a talent for rich characterisation.

The complex and authentic characters we experience in the vignettes make The Acceptables’ arc by comparison a little disappointing. Their trajectory as commercial darlings who strike out for more artistically credible territory is classic rock’n’roll mythologising. We have the haughty, hunky lead singer eyeing a solo career; the squirming label man; the sycophantic hangers-on. Time and context eventually reveal the band as small fish in the FREA pond, resetting their early success and subsequent fall back to Earth as an example of Australian smallness. That’s fun. Almost satisfying, in an unsatisfying way. But the microcosms of Eleuterio et al. tease us with a richer version of this band that we don’t see.

The Acceptables are eventually forgotten, and then later remembered as kitsch. We should all be so lucky. Where Big Time’s emotional punches may be erratic, the Australia it frames up is a thrill: an authoritarian Wild West, where the very last tall poppy has been chopped down. In the end, it’s The Acceptables’ safe mediocrity that offers the glimmer of hope to a rebellion wanting to unseat the FREA’s turgid hegemony. Mediocrity to take down mediocrity. Not an optimistic outlook, but it is funny—and seen in the context of our current political and cultural climate, ever so slightly too real.


Big Time is our Debut Spotlight book for July. Find an interview with author Jordan Prosser here.

Debut Spotlight is a paid partnership with Australian publishers designed to promote the critical discussion of new authors’ work to a wide audience. Titles are selected by KYD, and all reviews have editorial independence.