Tim Winton

History. Yes that was when history started on me. The day after the dog was taken, the day Jackson found Ronnie half crazed down by the river. If only we hadn’t had so many things to hide, so many opportunities for fear to get us. You can keep it all firm and tidy in you for a time, but Gawd Almighty when the continents begin to shift in you, you can’t tell tomorrow from yesterday. You run just like that herd of pigs over the cliff and into the water. - Stubbs.

Reading this short excerpt show more from Winton’s short novel one could reasonably expect it to be a book of suspense. It is, and it’s not. There’s a suspense hiding there, but it’s more a novel of four people, secrets, and the Australian bush

Tim Winton is known in Australia for his prose, and it was for his prose - about the Australians and the Australian bush that I delighted in while reading this book.

It is indeed very Aussie. Set in a valley the locals call The Sink, Winton tells us of the lives of four people. There’s Stubbs and Ida, almost stereotypical outback Australians, and two blow-ins, Jacob and Ronnie, who have come to The Sink separately. The book is told in the outward and inner voices of these four disparate Sink residents.

Here is Stubbs again, talking to himself about his wife of 30 years.

We’d spend some time together me and Ida. The children had grown and gone, and over the years Ida had fattened up. She sort of spread out like a garden gone wild. I think she was richer, better for the years. She developed a big wide laugh and her memory was gentle. She wanted the best for people, to think the best of them. She gave me the benefit of any doubt and she had a few, because looking back on it I see I’d grown grown in, gotten smaller, meaner with age. But she stayed even so, though sometimes I wonder why.

Stubs and Ida are farmers of the old-school. Ronnie (Veronica) is a 20 year old drug user who had high hopes of having a farm with her boyfriend - a pop-star wanna-be. He’s dumped Ronnie to find fame and fortune, leaving her to look after a goat, a cow, several Muscovy ducks, and a spinning wheel which stands unused in the run-down house they rented.

Jacob is a city man. He’s rented the best house in The Sink. He is recently divorced and has started to read books for the first time in his life. Books from his ex-wife’s collection, that he somehow ended up with after their less than amicable divorce. Apart from his disturbing memory of his two month old daughter asleep in a cradle with the family cat, all we really know about Jacob is that he’s monied and is a nice enough bloke.

The four are drawn together because of a strange happening - several animals are killed over two nights and it’s not obvious why. As the four lives interact from necessity - they all need to know why the animals have died The trauma of the needles deaths affect each and we learn about traumas of their past lives.

There’s a commonality in their pasts and these are gradually revealed as the four search for the animal killer. But Winton is sparse in his prose here and we are given small snippets - handed to us almost grudgingly through the individual character’s inner thoughts.

The bush is both loved and feared by Australians. It’s ugliness is its beauty and there’s no better living writer who can bring our bush to life.

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This is going to be one of my stand-out reads for the year. It's SUPERB!
Opening just after WW2, we meet two families who end up sharing a ramshackle and unlovely house - the Pickles - drunken floozy Dolly and her gambling husband . And their tenants- the driven Lambs- who, under the supervision of mother Oriel- open a successful grocery store.
And their children- anorexic Rose Pickles, the golden-child Fish Lamb, who suffers a brain-impairing accident in the first pages and will never be the show more same again- and his depressed brother Quick.
As twenty years roll by in Perth, as good and bad luck befall them, there is, too, a weird strand of magic realism running through a tale of everyday folk. And I'd say Winton carries it off- it just makes the saga SING.
Fabulous writing. show less

Superb evocation of the surf culture in Australia in the 70's, wistful and nostalgic, as Bruce Pike looks back on his adolescence in rural Western Australia, where, nicknamed Pikelet, he and his best friend Loonie graduate from childish pranks in the water to cutting their teeth in the surf. They are befriended by the enigmatic Sando, a past champion on the world circuit, who has abandoned competitive surfing to live a hippy lifestyle with his embittered American wife Eva, recovering from a show more bad injury which destroyed her skiing career, and pursues even greater challenges in waves that have never been surfed. He pushes to boys to challenge themselves, which suits Loonie , but makes the cautious Pikelet even more hesitant. In the end, left behind while Sando and Loonie go chasing surf in Asia, he turns to the sulking Eva, but finds his relationship with her poses as many challenges as tackling big waves. In a rather lengthy epilogue, Pike looks back on his own choices and the choices of his friends. Winton's descriptions of the sea and the surf are superb, literally breath-taking, and his capture of adolescent male angst and uncertainty equally engrossing, but somewhere along the line the book just seems to lack some emotional substance. Sando's need to drag the boys along with him is never really explained, equally Eva's sour bitterness and her fairly ruthless sexual exploitation of young Pikelet seem much deeper than just her injury and her annoyance with Sando's carefree lifestyle would indicate, but she remains a cipher whose motivations are left largely unexplored. In the end its a fairly conventional coming of age story made special by wonderful surf scenes, coloured by my own nostalgia for growing up on the beach in 70's Australia. A good book, a great read but falls a touch short of Winton's earlier works like Cloudstreet and In the Winter Dark. show less

This novel follows a rough blue collar Aussie and his 7 year-old daughter as they travel around Europe in search of his wife who appears to have abandoned them shortly after they relocate to rural Ireland.

I really like Winton's writing (here and in other novels). Very atmospheric and also very male. I liked but didn't love the story. I wanted to get more Ireland and less Greece I think. And though I think Jennifer is a total POS for leaving her kid, I can't say I blame her for leaving show more Skully. I didn't find him very likable or appealing. Billie was weirdly written as a character. Far too mature for a 7 year old. Still a good book. Lots of angles worth pondering and discussing. show less