Subtopia By A L McCann, Carlton North: The Vulgar Press, 2005, pages, paperback, $29.95. Reviewed by Jean-François Vernay in the May 2006 issue. Help more readers find out about this article
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Like many realist novels, Subtopia is the fruit of the author's experience. For a kid who lived out his adolescence in a quiet and desolate Melburnian suburb and ended up as an Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College in an American metropolis, one half-expects a novel of ideas set against the gritty urban backdrop of 1970s Australia. Julian, a narrator of many theories, recounts what he perceives as his static life:Events in suburbia seldom generate the dynamism that can propel us on to something else. Rather, they tend to stasis, like a boring plotless movie in which the camera seems to limp from one moment to the next, without being able to establish any meaningful of vital connection between scenes. I guess this lack of dynamism is part of the point of the suburb. Despite the multitude of little traumas that cluster around it, suburban experience is exactly the opposite of historical experience, which is big on making connections, big on building narratives out of whatever events it can lay its hands on. The suburb is history at a standstill. (40-1) Subtopia subtly attempts to segue from a Bildungsroman into the life account of Julian Farrell who ends up an expat in international capitals like Berlin and New-York City. At first, Andrew McCann's second novel reads like the coming-of-age story of a docile teenage boy from a modest background experiencing the regular ups and downs of childhood with a series of first times (the discovering of his uncle's porn material, the taste of booze, the exhilaration of drugs, the flirt with Sally) and losses (the loss of innocence and of virginity, the end of a romance and of friendship). In his introduction to The Jesus Man, Christos Tsiolkas states that 'Memory and myth, like fiction, tend towards the cataclysm, the catharsis, the tragic and the painful'. Andrew McCann's Subtopia, which reads like a recollection of Julian's childhood traumas (the quadragenerian uncle molesting sexually his younger sister, the close witnessing of a car crash, a threatening physical aggression by his loutish mate Martin Bernhard, a Molotov cocktail thrown in a laneway, a frightfully seedy-looking man barging into a room through the window, and Alison Cusk's tragic accident), backs up Tsiolkas's contention.
Clearly, Subtopia has an aroma of 'those redemptive, coming-of-age narratives in which a fuck-up protagonist finally accepts his mediocrity and succumbs to the reality principle', (253) as the author uncharitably puts it; but it also shares affinities with other subgenres such as grunge fiction, without completely encapsulating it. Sex in Subtopia is not depicted as an unromantic physical enterprise motivated by instant and self-centred gratification, following its classical representation in grunge narratives. What authors like Tsiolkas and McCann however share is a vested interest in the pornographic imagination. The impact of these 'images of sex I'd inherited from the recesses of the Silver Fox's cupboard' (59) lingers on in the narrator's imagination in the form of repeated porn-generated fantasies: 'My mind wandered back to the Silver Fox's photographs of women straining against dog collars: parted, painted lips, bound wrists, robotic, latex-clad torturers'. (102)
Subtopia is in fact part and parcel of contemporary urban literature which takes the opposite course of a long tradition of rural and bush tales, by conveying a sense of loss, disjunction, dislocation, alienation, vacuity, anxiety, undimmed pessimism and despair in the midst of a vast wasteland:For a moment I felt lost, utterly lost, a fragile bit of biology in a huge system of roads and rail and random associations, about to vanish altogether with the compulsive shuddering of the train, about to wake up on the other side of the darkened glass, a transparent reflection of myself. A ghost. (66) The general tone of blankness in the story even transpires in an unaffected style which mimics the banality of the setting.
In an interview, the author explains that: 'Subtopia' is a satirical contraction of 'suburbia' and 'utopia'. I wanted to suggest the ways in which urban and suburban environments deliver much less than what they promise us. I also wanted to evoke, ultimately, a politicised consciousness linked to an awareness of that fact. The sense of utopia betrayed is as evident to me in New York City as it is in the outer suburbs of Melbourne or Sydney. It would be improper to ignore this statement, which invites criticism. I should point out that Subtopia has little, if not none, of the characteristics of utopian narratives. Utopias are primarily hope-generating in their intent, while McCann's novel, which features discontented city-dwellers, is rather evocative of 'esperectomy' which Salman Rushdie defines as the 'ablation of hope'. In this sense, Subtopia is reminiscent of other disillusioned writers of his generation like Christos Tsiolkas, Edward Berridge, and Andrew McGahan.
In this respect, engrossing as it is, Subtopia may fail to appeal to readers who feel that Australian fiction has increasingly become serialised, homogenised and market-oriented. When an original and talented author creates a new subgenre, his or her fellow-writers are most likely to find it a welcoming niche begging for exploitation. Other readers might just feel that the novel aptly illustrates the traditional claim that contemporary western humanity is alienated from itself and from nature. Some might just think that Andrew McCann is legitimately the heir apparent of what I would call the 'esperectomic generation'. Citation - Jean-François Vernay. 'Review: Subtopia by A L McCann' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), May 2006. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 June 2013].
Back Cover Blurb - 1977. The fibro-belt suburbs of Melbourne's south. The names of West German terrorists crackle through the white noise of television news, but barely penetrate the soundtrack of the seventies. Endless summers, mass-market pornography, sport, and a sexual freedom precariously close, yet always just out of reach. Only when Julian meets Martin Bernhard, a ratbag of a kid who smokes, drinks and shoots model soldiers with his air-rifle, does the world start to look a bit larger, and a bit more dangerous. And once you get a passport and a plane ticket, it seems, you can be anything you want to be.
Have You Also Read? Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!: Builders Labourers Fight Deregistration, 1981-94
 Liz Ross, Carlton North: The Vulgar Press, 2004, 352 Pages, Paperback, $35.00Reviewed by Amanda McLeod in the March 2005 issue.In April 1986, after years of sustained attacks by the State, employers and the union movement, the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) was deregistered. Beginning in the aftermath of 1974 with Malcolm Fraser's conservative Coalition Government's attacks, Liz Ross' Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win chronicles the history of the BLF's fight against deregistration. In essence this book focuses on an unquestionably complex and controversial beast. As readers, we are asked to decide if the BLF was 'a rouge union deserving its fate or a militant union brought down because it was prepared to fight?' (263). In her forthright, partisan and ultimately persuasive account, Ross, using extensive ... read more.
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