Guest Review: Blue Giant
Jess Marie Worth recommends Jordan Prosser's new novel, Blue Giant
We’re matchmaking with some of Cursive Knives’ regular readers to sprinkle in some reviews of new and upcoming fiction to add to your TBRs. Jess Marie Worth recommends Jordan Prosser’s new novel, Blue Giant, out this week!
It’s a great time to find yourself, perhaps inordinately, moved by a Matt Damon film.
Abby Horne (the hapless, alcoholic, disordered protagonist of Jordan Prosser’s second novel, Blue Giant) would know.
Waking from a drunken bender that includes three consecutive rewatches of Ridley Scott’s The Martian, Abby has found her calling: to be the first person on Mars. Her ticket? MarsNow, a startup belonging to Danish tech entrepreneur, Tor Skovgaard, and currently recruiting for its one-way maiden voyage.
What follows is Abby’s last-ditch attempt to make a name for herself on a dying planet (and then evacuate it) powered by a carefully honed alternating roster of cheap imported beer and even cheaper white wine.
As Abby’s training regime takes her to public pools, primary school playgrounds, high school reunions and a brief sojourn into motherhood for an egg the parallels between her delusion and Tor’s becomes increasingly clear. But where Tor thrives in the underbelly of unfettered capitalism Abby is suffocated by it.
From films to click-bait listicles to designer clothing, Abby’s brain is so waterlogged by the onslaught of consumption that it simultaneously informs and disorientates almost every moment. She wakes each morning to an all-too-familiar digital info-dumping, washes her hair the way she learnt from a shampoo commercial, and repeatedly finds herself destabilised by the gap between the cinematic scenarios she imagines and a digitally optimised reality. It is, regrettably, hard to harness the true drama of demanding a ticket on the next fight out of Dodge when everything must be booked online now.
Moments of laugh-out-loud absurdity sit comfortably alongside biting observation and genuine tenderness as Prosser powers through climate catastrophe, identity, addiction, “unlikable” women, tech oligarchy and our place in the universe.
It’s a mix that feels particularly poignant in the age of privately-funded space travel as metaphorical rapture for the ultra-rich, and I loved it.
Based in Meanjin (Brisbane), Jess Marie Worth spends her working life writing for others and is relearning how to write for joy. She’s drawn to films, books and ideas that challenge, unsettle and linger.
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