- There's absolutely no doubt that Shaun Prescott is a brilliant, inventive writer. His first novel The Town blew me away. Absurdist in style and focus it conveyed the meaninglessness and emptiness of provincial lives in typical small towns in Australia. It's a common theme in Australian literature. The darkness underneath, the dead heart, and the desperate escape to the edge, the coastal cities, for community and salvation.
- Prescott's new novel Bon and Lesley continues this focus, but with deeper meaning and richness.
- Bon gets off the train at the desolate town of Newnes, adjacent to a forest in mid-Western NSW. He wanders around and meets Steven Grady and his younger brother Jack who are holed up in an abandoned weatherboard on the town's edge. The garrulous Steven tells stories, and Jack is very strange and quiet, absorbed in the surreal world of the dark internet. ‘He only ate chips, he only drank Coke or beer. He was rake thin and sallow’. 'He thinks he knows everything', according to Steven.
- Another stranger, Lesley, enters their lives. She is also lost and searching. The conversations are stilted but another layer of poetic and ethereal strangeness is added. As Steven says 'You know how we’ve quietly passed into a new real? I’m not an idiot, Bon. I know there’s something sinister about the mood around town’.
- The walk every day into the town to buy stuff, mainly beer, chips and junk food. And rum, which they get drunk on every night. They live abysmally meaningless, nihilistic lives. No religious beliefs, no political allegiances, no societal critiques, no current affairs awareness, no news watched or read, no serious relationships, no careers. They are excruciatingly boring. But Lesley does have dreams and aspirations. She yearns to discover a portal to the small town of her dreams, Sofala, 'because once we're there, none of us will have any problems'. And she will have two children, a boy and a girl, and lead a satisfying and happy life.
- There are many things dotted throughout the novel that add to its rich existential texture, and we're treated constantly to Prescott's insights and thrilling prose: ‘most truths were best left tangled in ambiguities’.
- I hope I'm not giving away a spoiler here but towards the end of the novel, in 'Part 3', Lesley and her mother and Lesley’s two young sons called, ironically, Stephen and Jack, are living in a regular industrial suburb of a larger thriving town. She loves her children and is very protective of them. Pubs and drunks are a common feature of the town of course but the more mature Lesley is warm and wise and happy and a delightful conversationalist. ‘…so we allowed the tide to carry us wherever it saw fit’.
- And in the last few pages Bon finally leaves Newnes and walks back to the large town, his home. He peers in through a window. ‘His children were inside and so was she’, his wife. A hint that Bon and Lesley married and had two kids. And perhaps the quick sexual episode when they shared a bed in Newnes was the most productive thing they ever did.
- Prescott has written a difficult book that demands you stay with it. You will not be disappointed. His writing is on another level altogether.
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