Book Review: Big Time by Jordon Prosser
Ever since I read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, I have always enjoyed reading dystopian novels. It’s a way to critique our world by representing it in the extremes whilst being a fun reading experience. So, I was intrigued to read the Australian dystopian novel Big Time by Jordan Prosser, published in 2024. I was intrigued even more by not only its genre of Australian dystopian fiction but also its unique centring of music and psychedelics.
Big Time is set in a not-so-distant dystopian future of Australia, where Western Australia has seceded from the east. The Federal Republic of East Australia (FREA) is an authoritarian start that shuns science, degeneracy and coincidences. We follow Julian, the bass player who comes back from South America and finds out his band front runner Ash has hijacked their second album and made it into a protest album. The Acceptables are a band on tour for this contentious album; that ends up being their last. At the same time, a new hallucinogenic drug called F, is spreading like wildfire across FREA which when taken it supposedly shows you your future. Julian has become hooked on the F drug as he struggles with possibilities of the future and unwillingly becomes a part of an anti-FREA resistance group with his ex-girlfriend.
As a rock music fan, I got invested with The Acceptables’s struggle to gain traction for their second album. The band’s first was a big success in FREA, for its pop-rock, ‘propaganda’ songs with safe lyrics and an easily digestible listening ability, but their second album takes a more political approach. I can imagine another version of this novel where The Acceptables toured this political album, and it became even more successful than the first – an army of fans rising up in revolution to the sound of a gnarly guitar riff. In my opinion, Big Timetakesthe better approach. The tour was a resounding failure only to be bastardised and defanged decades later. Big Time says a lot about how we consume music. When it is trying to say something more than just love, patriotism, nostalgia and fun, that’s when it becomes contentious, forcing us to look into a reality we might not want to see. Prosser clearly has a lot of love for music. I enjoyed the references to songs from Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell, to Killing in The Name by Rage Against the Machine.
One of my favourite aspects of this novel is how is portrays time. The concept of déjà vu as an existential dread in this universe and addictions to knowing your fate is so interesting. A fantastical event where two football games decades and continents apart played out in exactly the same way down to the referee calls lead to mass hysteria, causing FREA and other states to crack down to a hilarious degree on coincidences. The F drug is so addictive to these people because it takes away the unpredictable nature of what comes next. An odd fear of living in the moment.
Prosser creates a movie-like experience for the reader with tension and mind-bending moments that fully immerse you in each scene. In the beginning, when the protagonist takes F for the first time on a plane, Prosser creates a vivid feeling of a drug-induced fever dream. He conveys the way setting and time is morphed on trips, using murkylanguage so you as a reader start to feel high in those moments.
Whilst this idea of a future Australia is bleak, it is written in a way that is satirical and fun. Dark humour permeates the pages and tells the reader how ridiculous the situation is for our characters and how ironic the ending of their story truly is. I remember bursting out laughing at major moment in the book, when Julian makes a life-altering decision on page 331 that I can only describe as crazy. This humour didn’t ruin the terrifying nature of the premise, nor the messages Prosser was trying to communicate, but rather added a unique personality that I greatly appreciated.
**Spoiler alert. Skip to next asterisk to avoid the spoiler**
My biggest issue with this book is the unclear nature of the perspective. It is revealed to us that the narrator of this story is Wes, the band photographer who disappears from the story midway through. I can analyse that this may be a stylistic decision, having the band’s story told through the ‘lens’ of their photographer, but narratively it isn’t effective. I kept wondering when he would make his way back into the story he was telling but he never showed up. Big Time is written in a way that makes you forget who is speaking, and every time Wes would start speaking to the reader directly it took me out of the book. At the end, when there was no conclusion for Wes, I wondered what the point of this narration choice was.
**Spoiler over**
Another small critique I have is that there are too many other characters that muddy up the story. Some of the friends like Pig and Cleo and the foreign scientists Minnie, Edwina and Abel aren’t important enough. It took me a while to remember who they were.
That being said, the main characters are great – Julian, Oriana and Ash. Especially Oriana. Oriana is the cool girl archetype of the ‘rockstar’s girlfriend’ variety, a cliché turned on its head when we find out she is a major part of this resistance group against FREA. Think Julia from 1984 but with more depth. I liked how grey her character is, how she isn’t the perfectly uncorrupted revolutionary. In fact, she is quite faithless and unforgiving to her friends, including Julian. Ash is arrogant and Julian murders an innocent man at the start of the book, and screws over the resistance towards the end because of ego and greed. When you start to see Oriana and Julian’s true nature towards the end of the story, they aren’t portrayed as bad people, they are just people in a messed-up world.
What flies under the radar in this story is its critique on Australian culture. Prosser makes fun of our underdog identity. From a brief mention of skin whitening creams to the state’s obsession with bush poets, FREA has a white-washed, history revisionist identity that is a mirror image of real Australia, just enforced by law rather than simply applied.
There is a lot to love about Jordan Prosser’s Big Time. It doesn’t take itself too seriously in its identity as an adult dystopia akin to adult dystopias from the 20th century. It is above all, a dark comedy about music and psychedelics. It’s no literary masterpiece like 1984 or A Clockwork Orange, but I had just as much fun with this one, maybe even more. I encourage everyone to check it out and ride the time-distorting, drug-induced wave that is Big Time.
You can buy the book here.
Kasey Milburn
Acquisitions Associate