I've been 'saving' this novel. I really like Wayne Macauley's biting satires, but he's only published six of them and his second novel Caravan Story, was the last one left on my TBR. Now *sigh* I have to wait until he publishes a new one...

(You can see my review of the others here.)

Nominated for the Readings Prize, Caravan Story was first published in 2007, but reissued in 2012 by Text Publishing. This novella skewers the commodification of 'culture' in Australia, deftly exposing the way that it's only the arts administrators who can make a living in this country, and not the artists, actors, writers and musicians on whose work they depend...

This is the blurb from the Text website:

The first caravans arrive in a convoy. Wayne Macauley’s narrator, Wayne Macauley, is in one of them. He’s one of the artists removed from his home, given a new place to live and the chance to ‘give back to society’. In his strange new community, housed on a footy oval in a faraway country town, he is given his task. To create and be useful. To be thankful for the opportunity. He decides he will not give in to his misgivings; he will write. Then he finds out about the rejection slips already written for the work he has yet to submit…

One morning, the narrator, (whose name is Wayne) is asleep with his girlfriend in a squat, when he's woken by a bulldozer which has begun demolishing the house. Unperturbed, he makes love to her quietly and goes back to sleep, only to wake up later in a nightmare. Along with a crowd of other unsuccessful arts-funding applicants, he is expelled from the city by caravan, and ends up in a sports oval repurposed as a caravan park, where Polly the sexy arts administrator pulls them all into line. The actors are hived off into one group, the artists are another; there's a group of musicians, and then there are the writers. Polly knows that the writers are going to be difficult because they are the only group for whom she has to set up a game to help them break the ice...

Under her instructions we arrange our chairs in a circle and then one of us is given a ball, a medium-sized plastic ball with a tropical fruit motif on it. The person must throw the ball to someone else in the circle, but only, as we realise after two false starts, only after saying the first sentence of a story. The person who catches the ball must then provide the next sentence and so on. It's a story game, says Polly. The first player is an elderly man with a grey beard and his sentence is: As I walked out that day the air was crisp and clear. When it gets to me my sentence is: She took me by the hand and led me down the steps. It seems to go on forever. Polly has left us to our own devices and and gone over to the painters, we don't know whether we are supposed to find our own ending or wait till she comes back. (p.17)

Wayne can see that his partner is having a fine old time with the actors, when Polly comes back to marshall the writers into order. She provides them with a list of topics to write about, with instructions to choose a second preference in case their first choice is taken, and Wayne selects 'A Short History of Laburnum', a suburb not far from where he grew up. (This is typical of the kind of lame subject that writers (or arts administrators) without much experience of reading tend to think will be interesting to other readers. I am pretty sure that the only people conceivably interested in the history of Laburnam are people who live/d there. And even then, there won't be many of them.)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/11/26/caravan-story-by-wayne-macauley/ ( )