AustLit

'Sean Prescott’s second novel recounts an escape to the country – or does it?'

'In keeping with his successful début fiction, Shaun Prescott’s Bon and Lesley is set in a declining regional Australian town filled with oddball characters and plagued by otherworldly phenomena. The Town (2017) was published in seven countries and garnered apt comparison to, among others, Franz Kafka and László Krasznahorkai, as well as Australian writers Gerald Murnane and Wayne Macauley. Like these influences, Prescott’s work eludes definitive categorisation, though his second novel maintains distinctly ontological and surrealist emphases.' (Introduction)

'Fiction and dreams have a complicated, even toxic, relationship. Fiction is already a simulation of reality, with varying degrees of fidelity to The Real; and likewise, the process of reading, much like dreaming – and indeed writing – involves a theatrical envisioning of images in the mind. But dreams are maligned as narrative devices. Henry James’s fin-de-siècle advice – “tell a dream, lose a reader” – is aggressively ignored in print and on screen where, in the hands of plot-minded dramatists, dreams are no longer the anarchic spontaneities of the unconscious. Rather, they are tamed and subdued in the service of advancing plot or revealing character, and thus lose the allure of the uncanny.' (Introduction)