THIS novel, Tim Winton’s 13th, marks a departure. Like his others, the narrative is rooted in a landscape, an ecology, of his choice, from which his characters emerge. As before, it is an Australian vista: sun-scorched and sand-blasted — in particular, the north-west of western Australia, a place of extremes. What is different is that this is how the land might look in, say, 100 years or more from now. Such futurology is new literary territory for Winton.
Besides being a twice Booker-shortlisted novelist, Tim Winton is an environmental activist, and Juice springs from the encroaching nightmare that he sees as the legacy of what he calls “fossil capitalism”: a hell unleashed on the world by decades of selfishness and greed. This is a novel of fear and rage, which echoes the howls of the Old Testament prophets whose visceral language Winton grew up with in his fundamentalist childhood.
An unnamed narrator is escaping his past, in search of a haven, in a post-apocalyptic world in which even winter temperatures reach the forties, and you’re forced to live half the year underground. Anarchy, violence, and terror stalk the land. This man is tortured by the knowledge that his trials “were nor random accidents but deliberate acts undertaken with the knowledge of their consequences . . . other people’s sins”, and it enrages him. In this nightmare world, juice, both in the form of energy and the will to live, is essential. His search for both is desperate.
This man is accompanied by a small and silent child, a girl who represents both a burden and a hope. To join them as a reader is to undertake a dark and dangerous journey, which asks stark questions about what we might be prepared to do to survive.
Nihilism is an ever-present temptation, but the man refuses to yield. He holds on to a hope for redemption, that the world can heal. “Humans are not just destroyers,” he insists. “We’re makers. This is all I have to pass on and she’s all I have to pass it on to.”
This is not a polemic, or a jeremiad. Winton is a consummate, engaging storyteller. But it is an unsettling and challenging read, which asks whether my quietistic collaboration with the earth’s exploiters could to help reap these dire consequences.
The Revd Malcolm Doney is a writer, broadcaster, artist, and priest.
Juice
Tim Winton
Picador £22
(978-1-0350-5059-8)
Church Times Bookshop £19.80
