An audio book. The narrator's moved to an inland town in NSW, Australia that he dreamt he'd been to, in order to write a book about disappeared towns in the area. He shares a house with landlord Rod, who works in a petrol station. His girlfriend Siara wonders whether his book is fact or fiction. She presents a community radio show, which she suspects nobody listens to.
The narrator works in Woolworths. He's the only customer of a pub where he talks every so often to Jenny - the landlady?
He takes a ride on the only bus. Tom, the driver says he's the first passenger he's had for years. A girl once stopped him, asking if he'd put a poster up in a bus window, advertising a gig for an imaginary band. Music never dies.
The train station is now a museum. One freight train passes each day. The locals assume that it never was a station, and that the train is an exhibit run by the museum, though the museum's actually a shop selling local craft.
Tom has been in a band. Siara used to search for local metal music bands and started a magazine, faking reviews and interviews to fill the space. She obsessionally scatters cassette tapes around the town
A bottomless hole appears in the park. Then more. He forgets where he used to live before coming to the town. He hasn't been able to integrate with the town, only a few individuals. "Town" might in some way represent self-integration. He shifts the emphasis of his book, now describing the town.
He realises that events in books have meaning, whereas real-life events may not. The town people do what they're always done, not knowing why. His friend Rick works in a supermarket, diluting nostalgia by repetition.
Siara breaks up with Rob. She's carved a secret cellar under the town to store more cassettes. She hints about it in her magazine and on the radio hoping that it will be discovered. No-one finds it - does anyone look for it? He goes on her radio show to read from his book and do a phone-in. Nobody phones. He doesn't read.
The population's reducing, there's more drinking in public. He moves into an abandoned building. The Petrol station opposite gives him light. He walks down the train track, passing parts of the town he'd never noticed before.
He seeks the town's essence. Maybe the essential feature of the town is that there's always something missing - including its essence.
More holes appear. Are there holes inside people? A big, multi-house hole appears, with a mirror surface. People get rowdy. He's known for a while that Steve Sanders want to bash him in. They're all called Steve Sanders. One of them says to the narrator that he never says hello. He escapes. He and Siara take one of her parents' cars and head for the city. There they abandon the car and live in a hostel. They find that a 400+ page book has already been written about the town they've left and they're not in it. He drinks with some english people, who unlike him have a history and don't see shimmering at each horizon. He and Siara separate. At the end she's described as "barely an adult", much younger than the narrator.
Other reviews
- James Lasdun (Do these ideas catch fire, dramatically, in the way the best speculative fiction does? Perhaps not quite – the human element is a little thin, even allowing for the fact that the book is partly a portrayal of societal enfeeblement. But it’s an engaging, provoking novel nevertheless, intelligently alive to its own metaphorical possibilities, and leaving behind a powerful vision of the world ending, not with a bang, but a whimper.)
- Good reads
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