Review of the Day: Audition by Pip Adam

Some books speak to me deeply. This one did not. Pip Adam ‘s book is a short experimental novel about three people, Alba, Stanley, and Drew, traveling in a spaceship. If they talk, then the spaceship keeps moving; if they stop talking the ship slows and they continue growing. The three are filling up more and more of the ship as time goes by. By the end of the book, the narrator tells you that the three are incarcerated people, although Adam never tells us what crime they were convicted of.

The prose is decent and avoids cliches, but I almost never found myself stopping to admire a sentence. The absence of mistakes is not the same as sublime prose. I only had two passages I marked:

‘So, without being able to check a screen or a watch we have no idea how much time has passed. Maybe it has ceased passing. Since we stopped eating it is harder to tell. Our bodies were relatively reliable time mechanisms – hungry at certain times each day or at least hungry at certain distances from their last meals. But now we are hungry all the time. We slip sometimes in and out of dizzy sleep, but the sleep holds no order to it. It may have only been a day. This is a terrifying thought’ (p. 31).

and

Before the classroom, they were in prison. Nothing metaphorical or allegorical – just a regular prison (p 114).

The author says that “this book is about the abolition of prisons” (p. 223). I worked in a jail for six years and I have corresponded with prisoners through the postal service for some time. But Adam failed to make me care deeply about the characters in this book. Perhaps someone else will like Audition more than I did.

kindle and Audible audiobook. 228 pgs. 29 July 2025.

#scottlivesinjerseynow #bookstagram #prison #goodreadswithaview #picturesofbooks