The Shepherd's Hut

Out of the mouths of angry young men. When we first meet Jaxie he’s in a car heading North.
“For the first time in me life I know what I want and I have what it takes to get me there. If you never experience that I feel sorry for you.
But it wasn’t always like this. I been through fire to get here. I seen things and done things and had shit done to me you couldn’t barely credit. So be happy for me. And for fucksake don’t get in my way”.
We don’t realise when this is occurring. Jaxie weaves his story between the now and then. The one constant is his anger.
“But shit was always being done to me, every single day, and sooner or later you figure you should be the one doing unto others. So by Year Four kids were scared of me. show more And I spose I liked that. “
Jaxie’s mother dies from Cancer has he now left alone with “Captain Wankbag. The Captain. Or just Cap for short. …That bucket of dog sick was a bastard to both of us, I wished he was dead.”
Jaxie has a pungent turn of phrase, descriptive, emotive, raw.
“And how did I end up poleaxed in a bin? The usual way, that’s how. He wouldn’t give you the sweat of his balls, the old Captain, but when it come to dishing out a bit of biff when you weren’t looking, well, then he was like fucking Santa.”
Circumstances put Jaxie on the road and on the run. Ill prepared he ventures into the scrub where meats Fintan MacGillis who may or may not have been many things. Their interaction at the old shepherds hut Fintan is living in is like an elaborate dance. A step forward here met by a side step there, a shuffle, a hop. These two damaged people start to heal each other. Neither admitting what was happening and both distrustful, nevertheless Lexie stars to let go some of his distrust and anger.
Wintons’s skill with language and how it is used to encapsulate the character is on display here. Jaxie, is young, naïve, angry, wise, arrogant, wilful, driven, and open to the possibilities of a better future. A memorable young man. show less

the Rich canvas of Tim Winton!

Winton's opening instantly raises the tension. Justifiably angst ridden teenage Jaxi is heading for safety. His flight into the Australian outback 'bush' is grueling and I for one am amazed that he can even contemplate it, beginning as he does on foot. No one in their right mind heads into the Australian Outback as precipitously as Jaxie does! Carrying a gun, a few supplies, binoculars and water, all that he's able to scramble together, Jaxie heads out from Monkton in Western Australia north to Magnet to find his cousin and girlfriend Lee. His only friend. The only one who gets him.
Jaxie worked with his father Sid Clackton, aka Cap, the local butcher, a vicious alcoholic who has abused his wife and son all show more of Jaxie's life. When his mother dies with cancer, Jaxie is chained to his circumstances not through love as he had been, but through despair.
The thing is Jaxie arrives home to find Cap's body under the car, killed by the engine when a makeshift winch failed. Jaxie flees because he reckons people are going to say it was no accident, that he, Jaxie had killed Cap. Given that his father had just a few hours prior beaten the crap out of him, and that the only cop in town was Cap's friend, and as mean as his father to boot, Jaxie takes off.
Typical Winton reading! Hard, fast, and pithy with colloquialisms flying. As always his prose and descriptive writing is absolutely brilliant. If you've ever stepped though the Australian bush you'll recognize the landscape. If you haven't, imagining is made possible by a few words,
"I dug right into them scraggly trees. Stepping careful through the million sticks
and strips of bark in the shadows because getting snakebit wasn’t gunna be any
help."
I keep reading and am truly amazed by Winton's descriptions of the Outback, word pictures that bring to mind Fred William's paintings. Oh my! Just for this alone I'd give this book five stars. Let alone the story matter. This is a giant of a novel, unbridled and raw. I love it! And the small things, like Jaxie's binoculars, can be turning points.
Themes of violence, relationships, love, masculinity, and redemption are all heightened by the staccato delivery. Layer upon layer is pulled back as Jaxie's story unfolds and enriches in his meeting with Fintan MacGinnis, an Irish priest hermit type character in the middle of nowhere, all set against the brilliant light of the Western Australian landscape. An unapologetic view of life's harshness and relationships. I was fixated!

A NetGalley ARC show less

The Shepherd's Hut by Tim Winton is a highly recommended novel that is emotional, disturbing, and brutal but eloquently written.

Jaxie Clackton, 15, a physically and emotionally abused young man flees the small town where he lives after seeing his father’s accidental death. Jaxie takes a small amount of food, a rifle and a water jug and then starts out on foot through the back county of Western Australia, setting a course toward where his cousin Lee lives. He loves her and thinks they can escape somewhere together after he hides out for a while. After hiking for days, starving and thirsty, he comes to an abandoned cabin where he takes shelter. When exploring one day, hoping for water, he sees a shepherd's hut and meets exiled priest show more Fintan MacGillis. Jaxie must decide if he can trust MacGillis. The two eventually forge an unlikely bond until Jaxie discovers something nearby that could threaten the safety of both of them.

This is Jaxie's first person account and Winton writes in Jaxie's vernacular, slang and all which might throw some readers for a loop. Most of the words you will be able to figure out through the usage. As he talks about his father's cruelty and the beatings and then his acting out, your heart will break - and then you'll wonder why the neighbors in the small town didn't take action. It will physically hurt when he talks about his mom, who passed away from cancer, and her not leaving her husband despite the beatings... and Jaxie puzzles out why she stayed. Jaxie thinks he is tough, has acted out, because he's had to be tough.

Winton's ability to portray Jaxie and MacGillis is absolutely amazing. The writing is impressive and eloquent. The story is troubling, full of pain and suffering. This is a story of damaged people respecting each other's secrets and trying to form a very unlikely friendship. For those who need to know, there is blood. There is catching and butchering animals. There is swearing and bad grammar as this is Jaxie's voice. These are two social outcasts working together. It is the story of a boy becoming a man.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2018/06/the-shepherds-hut.html show less

Tim Winton sets THE SHEPHERD'S HUT in the awful salt lands of Western Australia to explore some large themes. This place punishes those who dare to enter it. Winton’s narrator, 17 year-old Jaxie Clackton, sums it up thusly: “the kind of country that’d boil your insides dry in a day.” “a place so empty a fella’s thoughts come back from it as echoes.” “Everything you saw and touched out there looked like tetanus waiting to bite your arse.” This is the backdrop Winton uses to muse about what it takes to survive and hope when life is stripped bare; the various ways manhood can be expressed; how the young sometimes can be forced to grow up too fast; and how violence will shape character.

Jaxie is a young man who has been show more abused and now finds himself isolated, both figuratively and literally. His abusive stepfather has died in an accident and Jaxie is sure that he will be blamed. “They’ll say I kicked the jack out from under the roo bar and crushed his head like a pig melon.” “It all points to me.” So he runs to the only person who he has left to care about, his cousin Lee. Fearing that their relationship would become sexual, her parents have separated the two teenagers. To get to Lee, Jaxie must cross the salt lands. During his trek, Winton gives us Jaxie’s backstory and worldview using an internal monologue peppered with a lot of clever Aussie slang. “Some nights there was so much feeling in me head I was glad it couldn’t get out.” “You could burn a skyscraper down with the what’s in me.”

In his travels, Jaxie meets Fintan MacGillis, a defrocked Catholic priest who has been banished to this godforsaken place for some unspecified disgrace. They develop an uneasy relationship that Winton uses to challenge Jaxie’s potential for transcendence. “He talked so . . . much it was like a junkpile he chucked at you.” For his part, Fintan insists he is no “pedo” and denigrates Jaxie by referring to him as the “wild colonial boy.” Clearly both characters are outcasts in need of some form of deliverance. One anticipates that they will find it in each other, but this may be overly optimistic. Unfortunately, a rather abrupt ending that seems to come out of the blue mars the novel. Also one wishes that Winton had developed the relationship between Jaxie and Fintan more fully. Can Jaxie rise to the challenge or will he run away again? This and most of the interesting questions Winton raises with Jaxie remain unresolved in the end. He wonders: “What does that make me? Someone you won’t see coming, that’s what. Something you can’t hardly imagine.” show less

Wow. Just wow. This is tim Winton at his finest. I have just finished this and I’m still processing. In short, an abused teenager, Jaxie, comes home to find his father dead (this isn’t a spoiler, it happens within the first couple of chapters). He then takes off into the bush and comes across an isolated older man.

As in all tim winton’s books, the landscape of Western Australia is a character in its own right. Harsh, brutal but luminescent, the desolation and loneliness underpins the book. Apart from the landscape there are only two major characters, jaxie and the older man, who I don’t want to give too much detail about (spoilers sweetie!) however tim Winton develops them brilliantly, showing Jaxie’s development and growth show more from a neglected, abused and angry teen into someone who wrestles with doing the right thing and loyalty and family, when he hasn’t had an example of this in his home life. He also explores growing older and regrets and paying for our past sins, and the way this plays on our minds obsessively.

As in all good literature, this book questions what does it mean to be human? What do we want in life? And how do we cope when what we want doesn’t eventuate? When life and circumstances throw a spanner in the works? What is truly important to us as humans?

At times brutal, heartbreaking, tender and humourous, sometimes all at once, the minutia of survival under the odds, whether physical or emotional, is stripped down to the bones. I hope it works out well for jaxie, and he finds what he is looking for. show less

I am going to digress a bit on this one as I just read that it is being criticised for the main characters being only male and the ngative way the few women characters are portrayed. I am aware of the Me Too movement but I am stunned when I read someone telling an author either how they should have written their or how their book fails because it doesn’t contain certain items from an agenda. I have also read how white people cannot write authentically about black people, men about women and so on.

Jesus Christ! it is fiction for fuck sake. It is not real! It requires an imagination not a fucking checklist of permissible characters. Grow up and write your own book to show all us dumb fucks how it should be done. I dare you!

Now to this show more very fine book.

One of the things I love about Tim Winton’s writing is how he brings the country and its people alive. I am in Oz right now as I write this and unless you have been here it is very hard to describe the immenseness, dryness and specificness of this country. There is no shortage of bad people here and a lot of space to bury bodies. His combination of bad people and huge dry open spaces is put together so skilfully I am looking out for these people as I drive along. Any ute with a good covering a red dust surely is driven by a psychopath who has just buried a few in the outback.

This is a fraught narrative, more a stream of semi-consciousness than a well told tale. A meeting of opposites in a place that just wants people to die.

Last time I was here the police were digging up an area where a man had buried a dozen or more hitchhikers before he died and then his nephew took over the “family business” and buried eight or nine more. Meanwhile just down the road the police were trying to catch a father and son who had been on the run for around three and a half years obviously getting aided by people as they are chased across the state. It’s that kind of country and it takes a massive talent to get even close to capturing the essence of this place. Thank you Mr Winton show less

I have really mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, the writing is powerful and the sense of place is superb. The Australian slang is nonstop, but I looked up a few words and got the gist of the rest in context. I wouldn't want the language smoothed, out, because it felt key to the characterization.

The plot is straightforward but full of symbols and allusions. Teenager Jaxie Clackton is on the run from home; his mother died a while ago and his father has just died in an accident. Jaxie is afraid he'll be accused of murdering him, so he takes off in a hurry, barely provisioning himself for his journey. He is on foot, heading for a town where his cousin lives (a cousin he's in love with and ordered to stay away from). The first show more half of the story, which I found very effective, takes the reader on the journey with Jaxie. We're constantly in his head and the time frame switches between his present circumstances and flashbacks to his difficult past. Jaxie lives off the land, finding water when he can and killing animals to eat. The killing and butchering is graphic, every time.

Then, about halfway through the novel, Jaxie encounters an exiled Irish priest who lives in the titular shepherd's hut. At first he is very wary of this old man, fearing the worst about him, but eventually he comes to trust him and they spend what appear to be months together. This part of the novel is the most laden with symbolism; the shepherd's hut, the boy wandering in the near-desert (complete with a salt lake), the mysterious old man who takes him under his wing. The man is provisioned twice a year by someone he knows but who remains mysterious to the reader and to Jaxie (he's from the church, but why he's doing it we never find out), and he also grows vegetables and traps and butchers goats for food. More graphic descriptions of that, too.

Then, in the last quarter or so of the book, the action ramps up and we are suddenly reading a thriller. Jaxie stumbles on something that lets him know they are not alone in this wilderness, and soon all hell breaks loose. There is mayhem, violence, and carnage. It's highly suspenseful and page-turning, but it made no sense to me whatsoever, and it made me start questioning what had gone before.

SPOILER

There is an idiot-plot move: after leaving his binoculars behind once, why did he do it again, except to generate the rest of the story? Why did he take so long to act when the men showed up and started working over Fintan? If he could shoot them at the end, why couldn't he shoot them earlier? He was watching the whole time? Why did he stay for months with Fintan if he was dying to get to Lee? He made moves to leave but never did.
END SPOILER

Toxic masculinity is supposedly a theme of this novel, and I can certainly see it in Jaxie's father, but I didn't see how Jaxie was necessarily condemned to suffer from it as well. I mean, by the end the reader sees that he does, but where is the information that tells us why? Like father like son seems a bit trite and incomplete. For as much time as we spent in Jaxie's head (he's the only POV character), I never felt we got the information we needed to make sense of his actions. There are a variety of possibly explanations, but they're speculative rather than emerging from the text.

There are only two female characters that matter in the book: Jaxie's mother, who is loving but completely ineffectual and abused, and Lee, who functions as a lodestar for Jaxie.

Before the ending I would have given this 4 stars, probably, but the ending was just so out of left field and underbaked. show less