A man named JW Dunne once had several troubling dreams that came inexplicably true: his watch stopping at an exact time; a factory catching fire in Paris; a volcano erupting on the island of Martinique. These prophetic experiences urged him to write An Experiment with Time, a 1927 book that – though its scientific hypotheses were entertained but roundly rejected – piqued the interest of literary figures from Jorge Luis Borges to HG Wells. It scratched at the question: what if we experience time beyond the present moment?
Jordan Prosser’s debut novel, Big Time, takes that inquiry a step to the left: what if a drug could do that instead? In this lush, narcotics-dense, psy-fi trip of a book, a new eyedropper-applied substance called “F” enables its users to snatch glimpses of the future. The certainty of a vision isn’t guaranteed and experiences vary: most users lurch forward a few seconds or minutes. But the novel’s protagonist Julian – the earnest yet arrogant bassist of a newly famous band, the Acceptables – can stretch weeks, months, even years into the then.
The now of Big Time is the 2040s in a divided Australia. A guarded wall cleaves the nation between the free western states and the autocratically governed Free Republic of Eastern Australia, where the DID (the Orwellian-named Department of Internal Decency) maintains an oppressive chokehold: culture is redacted; the state-controlled AusNet has replaced the internet; nonconformists disappear into work camps or are executed. This is home for Julian and the fellow members of their inoffensive, algorithmically approved band, which has found fame in this fascist dystopia. Their second album in the making, however, is proving provocative.
The gulags of Prosser’s richly imagined world aren’t speckling Australia’s horizons just yet but this speculative novel keeps a toe dipped just enough in the tangibly plausible to evoke some resonant parallels. Everything now wrong with Australia began with its mythologies, one character remarks: “The loveable rogue-morphosis. The plucky larrickin-ating. The valiant Anzac-ification”. Through the satirising of this “lucky” country’s conservative, “ultracop” id, Prosser shines a garish light on our jingoistic fervour and siloed provincialism. “Whatever’s bad about it now was there before,” the novel’s narrator, Wes, tells a foreigner. “It just became the law of the land.”
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Prosser’s penchant for detail can get mired in specificity – “Julian jiggles the perfume sampler, lifts his left hand, pries the eyelids of his left eye open, sprays, feels a sudden, needling sensation on his cornea, blinks, swaps hands, pries the eyelids of his right eye open, sprays, blinks.” But elsewhere, amid all frantic, drug-fuelled chaos, he’ll leave you with a delicate fragment that lingers like an afterimage: purple clouds rolling in “like day-old bruises”; an older woman reflecting on her youth “like a knife warm off the anvil, gleaming and true and impossibly sharp”.
Visually, it is all very movie-like, which isn’t a surprise considering Prosser – the only person alive whose CV lists being a voice actor in Happy Feet 2 and a director of a La Porchetta commercial – is also a screenwriter. You can sense this in Big Time’s measured pace, coordination between myriad characters (perhaps too many) and attention to mise-en-scène. You also sense it in Prosser’s choice to narrate the novel via the omniscient perspective of Wes – one of the band’s hangers-on – whose camera-winking, that’s-me-by-the-bar narration gets a bit contrived, a bit Ferris Bueller. It’s a relief when the book, somewhat abruptly, ditches him.
There are many competing areas of interest in Big Time – youth, coincidence, fate, authoritarianism, memory, free will, chance, creativity, rebellion, consumerism, the eventual heat death of the universe and obliteration of all existence – and Prosser makes you think and feel something about each. The enduring resilience of music is key though – the author evokes how there’s no time-travelling drug like it. Like a kick to the head, music returns us to the past, or thrusts us into the future by allowing us to “see” – and believe – that a different one may be possible. But as things stray into the kumbaya, Prosser astutely draws attention to the caveats: nostalgia can be “inherently conservative”; envisioned idylls aren’t replacements for tangible action.
Big Time, with its hallucinogenic blend of dystopic soothsaying and raucous imagination, is a bit Philip K Dick, a bit Jennifer Egan, a bit something unique to Prosser. It keeps its Black Mirror-esque twists coiled tight (most, at least), and they threaten to take out an eye when released. It prods and pokes at the “Big-T”, interrogating time’s slipperiness, its iridescent hues and gradations, all with a droll wit and raised brow. It’s not perfect but it’s an addictive debut arriving on the scene with the frenetic energy of a drummer smacking his sticks together and shouting, “ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR!”
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Big Time by Jordan Prosser is published by UQP ($34.99)
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