Book Review: The Town, by Shaun Prescott

There’s a part in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray’s Phil Connors is talking with two Punxatawney derelicts in a bar, who knows how long into his confinement in the town, where one of the derelicts says Phil strikes him as a “glass half empty” kind of person.

Phil, lost in the neverending small-town hell, replies: “What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”

The other derelict, soppy in his beer, responds “That pretty much sums it up for me.”

Phil, of course, escapes his exile in small-town hell as he gives up the self-pity and self-loathing and loses himself in service to what he discovers are the delightful characters of this small hamlet in western Pennsylvania that make the town pleasant, appealing, and definitely worth living in.

At the end of his film, having won the heart of his long-long-ed-for Rita, he says, “Let’s live here. We’ll rent to start.”

I’ve just finished reading Shaun Prescott’s “The Town,” set mostly in a dusty kinda central Australian town gradually being lost, footpaths, fibro houses, and listless, useless inhabitants and all, to a mysterious shimmer never really explained.

At first I saw Phil and the two derelicts in the town, in the story, and thought, “Well, maybe there’s redemption somewhere along the way.” I had my doubts – Prescott’s story was compared to Kafta, famous for no redemption whatsoever.

And I went with that feeling – but not with allusions to Kafka, but more with allusions to Jean-Paul Sartre, who famously wrote “Hell is other people.”

The concluding idea to Prescott’s story is similar, but perhaps even more gloomy: Apocalypse, it seems, is other people.

Because Prescott’s town suffers a nameless, formless apocalypse wrapped in the metaphor of holes appearing and causing blocks of the town and its inhabitants to disappear, but the story is really an apocalyptic tale without the apocalypse, as the people his characters encounter are a far worse fate than any mysterious shimmer could ever be.

There’s a lot about belonging to this tale, and at the end, well, nobody really finds it. There’s no surcease from the hell of the small town in the city.

Early on in the novel, we get this:

“People might be wiser to cower in towns. Maybe they wouldn’t be so devastated when the sea water rose. Maybe when everything became desperate, a small town would finally live up to the qualities that everyone believed them to have: Namely, that everyone would help one another out. Maybe the town would have tea parties during the apocalypse, while people in the city tore each other to shreds.”

Of course, people in the town tore each other to shreds, whether through a grudge, a fistfight, or general disdain. When the apocalyptic shimmer arrived and claimed victims, no one seemed too bothered, as it wasn’t them being lost forever.

The protagonist and Ciara, another small-town denizen, flee to the city, and quickly discover this:

“[Ciara] told me that everyone in the city speaks about the city in the same way that people in the town spoke about the town. They say the city is not what it used to be. If she asks what it used to be, they simply reply that it used to be more like a city.”

The apocalypse of people find them in the city, though the shimmer is long left behind. And it not needed, as the apocalypse is there all along.