The narrator of Audition is a famous actor. Not Hollywood-A-List-famous, but famous enough to be recognised, by those in the know, in a public place. At the novel’s opening, she walks into a restaurant and is shown to a table where a young man is already seated. The two have not met in person before, yet already there is tension between them. The young man – Xavier – has asked for a meeting, because he has something important to tell her. Xavier believes that he might be her son, a piece of speculation our narrator immediately rejects as being impossible. In the moments following Xavier’s dropped bombshell, our unnamed narrator is shocked to see her husband, Tomas, entering the restaurant. Tomas does not normally frequent this part of town, so what is he doing here? Our narrator is immediately filled with anxiety, that Tomas will see her sitting with Xavier and jump to the wrong conclusion.
Part Two of Audition sees us entering what might be an alternate world, a timeline in which Xavier really is the grown-up son of Tomas and the narrator. The narrator is still a famous actor, with a recent, ongoing success in a feted new stage play. Xavier is working as personal assistant to the play’s director, Anne. Then Xavier asks if he can return for a while to live in the family apartment and everything goes Roman Polanski (Repulsion/Cul-de-sac era) pretty damn quick.
A couple of years ago I reviewed Ian Reid’s third novel, We Spread, in which recently widowed Penny finds herself trapped in a sinister care home whose other occupants appear to have been subsumed into some sort of group identity. To be honest, I preferred Reid’s earlier novel – and its brilliant film adaptation by Charlie Kaufman – I’m Thinking of Ending Things. But We Spread is expertly done, a novel that makes perfect sense on its own terms, tautly imagined and strongly achieved by a writer fluent enough in genre conventions to successfully undermine them. Audition feels as if it’s working from some of the same tropes – fear of stasis, erosion of identity, one’s life being encroached upon and taken over by exterior forces. Are we to intuit that we are all playing parts – accustomed roles – within our own lives, that we are ‘auditioning’ for a part that has been pre-ordained for us? Are we the version of ourselves that we present on the ‘stage’ of public life, or is there a deeper, hidden reality that is only kept within bounds by the forces of convention? Is the whole thing just a play within a play??
Yeah, probably. But to my own unbelieving horror, the peerless expertise in undermining the tropes of detective fiction that made Kitamura’s earlier novel A Separation such a landmark text for me is a total no-show in Audition. Even the title – which must for horror fans immediately summon the ghost of Takashi Miike’s brilliant and unsettling 1999 screen adaptation of Ryu Murakami’s 1997 novel of the same name – hints at riches that are never delivered.
In his previously discussed masterpiece One Boat, Jonathan Buckley achieves his desired atmosphere of uncanniness, of underlying doubt through specificity: his diamond-bright evocation of a particular landscape makes its shadows deeper, the narrator’s own ruthless self-examination reveals a grief that may never be fully describable but is nonetheless felt. Audition appears on the surface to be similarly rigorous in its approach, similarly pared-back; in fact it is mushy, non-specific, a woolly, careless mass of might-bes and perhapses. The game-changing cameo role that cements the narrator’s reputation is never described, just as the play she is acting in now remains just a title. What kind of a ‘writer’ is Xavier? Or indeed Tomas? Who did the narrator have an affair with in the hinterland of Part One? In terms of language as well as action, Kitamura falls into the trap that is the undoing of many would-be horror writers in equating vagueness with subtlety. We don’t really know what’s going on here – but worse, we don’t really care.
A couple of days ago, I was discussing with some friends this recent review of Audition by Adam Roberts. Not having yet read the novel, I came out hotly in defence of Kitamura: Adam, I felt convinced, just didn’t get her. Turns out he was right, and I was wrong. Given how much I have loved and admired A Separation and its follow-up, Intimacies, Audition is a significant disappointment.
Could it be a contender?
No, just no. I could waste the rest of the morning listing books that would have been more interesting and worthy additions to the Booker longlist. To put an overused but in this case appropriate question: what were they thinking??