Seen one way, The Great Undoing is a pretty straight apocalypse thriller – something like an Australian Station Eleven. A series of pandemics, state failures and communications breakdowns leads to much of the world’s population becoming dependent on BloodTalk: first developed as immunity technology, then used to track identities, locations and bank accounts, with a predictably coercive effect on border surveillance and policing.
Historian/truth-teller Scarlet Friday is researching in London when the system crashes in a global blackout and society falls into violent chaos. Her friend and mentor, David, leads the pair on Children of Men-style break for it. His ambitious hope is to get them back undetected to a locked-down Australia, where (with an arch nod to both this country’s colonial history and its contemporary Covid politics) the BloodTalk tech was designed and distributed – and where David seems to have a vague plan to sort things out.
But the major point of Sharlene Allsopp’s debut is that nothing should be seen just one way.
The Bundjalung writer presents her novel as Scarlet’s journal, written on the run over a copy of Ernest Scott’s A Short History of Australia. The real-life historian’s observations very literally “intrude” as Scarlet records her and David’s exodus. But she counters Scott’s racist assumptions with her own research notes, corrections, memories and ideas, filling the margins with scrupulous citations and annotations. Scarlet narrates in vignettes, revealing more through asynchronous flashbacks to painful family events, a (pretty soppy) rock star romance, a life connected to country. Allsopp has previously spoken of being inspired by Claire G Coleman’s articulation of Indigenous understandings of time, “the all-at-onceness of everything”. But this mode also echoes the processing of trauma, past and present, that emerges throughout the journey. (“i am writing in vignettes because all we have are fragments,” reads the epigraph from the Lebanese-Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani.)
Pre-apocalypse, Scarlet is investigating her great-grandfather William Olive’s role in the first world war, trying to cut through the “deliberate collective forgetfulness” about First Nations people in the archive of a country that “crave[s] the illusion” of a friendly founding. William Olive is also Allsopp’s great-grandfather, to whom the book – originally planned as a memoir – is partly dedicated. Fact and fiction blend, and so do author and narrator. History is “just” story anyway, Allsopp suggests, “no more credible than any other genre”. Scarlet commits instead to truth-telling, seeking out “multiple-voiced accounts” that don’t tidy away ugly moments for the sake of a stable narrative. Fragments of William’s life emerge most brightly through Scarlet’s family lore – the “deep wound” of lost knowledge counterbalanced by “other forms of history”: songs, stories and poetry that nourish “continued existence”.
“My life is a text made up of all the stories I have read and been told,” Allsopp writes in the acknowledgments. From the satirical repurposing of Austen on the first page, Scarlet’s informal, diary-style narration is an artlessly sincere ode to her influences: Oodgeroo Noonuccal, The Lord of the Rings, Christos Tsiolkas, Behrooz Boochani, Tara June Winch, the Bible, the Beatles … compilation as an ebullient and communal self-figuring, paralleling the experimental Checkout 19.
Doing anything interesting with form invites risk – and here, unfortunately, a lot feels undigested. The novel leaves little unsaid, explaining each “personal mythology”, analysing its own format and constantly restating its own aims. Thought-provoking lines slotted between so much else take on the air of movie taglines (“When a nation is built on a lie, how can any version of its history be true?”; “You refuse the future until you reckon with the past”); rhetorical questions and explicit asides (on the power of language, the nature of truth, the ties of love) begin to verge on didactic. The tendency to over-explanation in contemporary Australian writing sometimes feels like a depressing loss of faith in the reader.
Then again, this montage approach effectively disrupts the reader’s immersion in the adventure, to political effect. “Genre constructs meaning,” Scarlet reflects early on. Her “palimpsest” functions principally as critique – an annotated draft exploding recorded history. She defines colonisation, at one point, as “the act of destroying all voices but one” – by that logic, The Great Undoing’s collage ethic renders it anti-colonial all the way down to the form.
It joins a rich body of First Nations speculative fiction turning the lens on the nation’s politics. Allsopp’s hypotheticals are pointed and gripping, playing out the logical consequences of Australia’s hostile insularity and “refusal to sit in the truth of her own formation”. Its citizens, ironically, find themselves “refugees” overseas, dangerously isolated and ostracised. Once the system fails, salvation lies in forms of community governments have spent decades dismantling. The book is littered with more traditional dystopian thrills, too: the well-placed detail of smell or sound; the frightening warping of human behaviour under extremity.
But as Scarlet makes her harrowing journey home amid the wreckage of an old world, she finds an optimism in human nature too – “the kindness of a stranger … still a solid bedrock”. Allsopp, like her narrator, is curious about the kinds of connections that are “deeply embedded and not vulnerable to dispossession” – that might weather apocalypses personal and social.
The Great Undoing by Sharlene Allsopp is out now through Ultimo
