Book Club - Sharlene Allsop’s The Great Undoing.

Final Draft - Great Conversations

Sharlene Allsop is the debut author of The Great Undoing.

The Great Undoing offers up a speculative future where our endless drive for connectivity and security threatens to turn society on its head.

Scarlet Friday is a truth teller in a hyper connected world. Her job is to explore archives and provide context for the official narrative of history. Knowing is something of a state of being in Scarlett’s world. With everyone connected by BloodTalk it can seem like the world is unifying. Yet even as everyone seems to be hurtling towards the future Scarlet delves into the past to understand our place, her place.

Scarlet work becomes something of an obsession when she discovers her Great-Grandfather’s military service and the hostile reception he received as an Aboriginal man returning to a country that wouldn’t recognise his humanity. Scarlett feels driven to unlock his past to make sense of her own present.

But the past is never truly buried and outside Scarlett’s archives the rest of the world is teetering on the brink. As systems shut down around the world, Scarlet finds herself on the run. Unwelcome in England, she is now a refugee seeking safe passage back to Australia.

The Great Undoing is a strange and compelling novel about what it means to live in a world that runs on information. As protagonist, Scarlett Friday is both victim and foil to this ever present need to know.

Sharlene Allsop’s speculative future sees us all connected through the (hopefully) fictional technology of BloodTalk. Conceived as kind of biohack that links us all into a hyper online world wide web, BloodTalk both facilitates and hinders life depending on who you are.

Allsop is playing with ideas of an ever evolving world order that demands accountability. BloodTalk connects but it also compels, meaning people can fall out of its good graces and then they are adrift. In this world the right people are always at home but also seemingly never connected to land or place so much as their digital existence.

Connection is also inextricably linked to the past and Scarlett's role as a truth teller shows the reader something of this future’s need to reconcile itself to its past. The conceit of truth telling is creatively imagined through the literal writing of Scarlett’s story; the book is written over the pages of a faded tome, Ernest Scott’s A Short History of Australia. Scott’s work is a triumph of colonial, ‘victor’ history and the very thing a truth teller would seek to contextualize not overwrite. Through this device we see the interplay of present and past and must work to read these coherently, even as they intrude on each other.

The real battle for connection builds in pace as Scarlett is forced on the run. When she was safe in her world Scarlett seemed to project the luxury of time, that sense that we will always have tomorrow to figure things out. Thrown out of her old life she must try to find the things that connect her, even as she makes a desperate bid to get back to the land that has raised her up.

The Great Undoing is a fascinating and insightful novel about identity and where we draw our sense of self. The narrative works hard to hold together its threads as we shift back and forth through Scarlett’s story. Like most speculative fiction it is most satisfying, and most terrifying when it skirts closer to our contemporary world than we might otherwise feel comfortable with.