Publication Date: March 21, 2023
In this hybrid novel—part essay, part prose poem, part travel narrative—Blair Austin brings us nose to the glass with our own vanishing world, what we preserve and at what cost.
In a city far in the future, in a society that has come through a great upheaval, retired lecturer Wiggins moves from window to window in a museum, intricately describing each scene. Whales gliding above a shipwreck and a lost cup and saucer. An animatronic forest twenty stories tall. urban wolves in the light of an apartment building. A line of mosquitoes in uniforms and regalia, honored as heroes of the last great war.
Bit by bit, Wiggins unspools the secrets of his world—the conflict that brought it to the brink, and the great thinker, Michaux, who led the diorama revolution, himself now preserved under glass.
After a phone call in the middle of the night, Wiggins sets out to visit the Diorama of the Town: an entire, dioramic world, hundreds of miles across, where people are objects of curiosity, taxidermied and posed. All his life, Wiggins has longed to see it. But in the Town, he comes face to face with the diorama’s contradictions. Its legacy of political violence. Its manipulation by those with power and money. And its paper-thin promise of immortality.
Somewhere in the future is a society that remembers the past by looking at a three-dimensional model, much like the museum displays of today.
Author Blair Austin uses this as the basic premise for Dioramas. The end result is a mashup of prose and poetry with minimal dialogue and character development. The focus, instead, is on the stories contained within the dioramas.
There’s no doubt that this selection is best suited for dystopian readers comfortable with seemingly random observations. Chapters may consist of several pages or only a few lines. The only consistency is the unknown behind each turned page.
Without a clear sense of characters or purpose, it is challenging for a reader like me to get my bearings. While I can appreciate the author’s talent in using vivid language, this selection didn’t work for me.
Dioramas provides a literary experience for readers who enjoy dystopian fiction and are skilled at drawing conclusions pulled deep from within the content.
A former correctional librarian, Blair Austin was born in Michigan and attended the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where the seed novel for Dioramas won a Hopwood Award. Dioramas is his first novel.
