Juice by Tim Winton, Penguin Hamish Hamilton, 513 pages, $49
There's no disputing that Tim Winton is a lord of language. Here is a passage almost at random from his new immense novel, Juice.
They followed a procession of people. They were like us, coming in every colour and shape. Except bigger than us. Their faces plump and shiny as melons. Their arms meaty, with dimpled hands. The size of them took some getting used to, but soon I was more caught up in where they were, what they wore, the stuff they had around them. Sleek cars in wild colours. Huge, padded suits. Glass-faced helmets. Ships. Buildings that reached into the clouds. Beds the size of whole rooms. Devices that ripped green crops, sucked dirt, made women’s hair dance. There were tables laden with food, bristling with ornaments and implements I didn’t recognize. I felt a wave of awe. And then a kind of weight, like shame. As if these were things I should never see. I didn’t really know what I was viewing. I only knew it was not for me. I would never have it – any of it – and I couldn’t bear to watch another moment. (Page 84)
We know we’re in the presence of a writer of great imaginative power, as this weird immersion in some visionary extravaganza indicates. But Juice is a book that makes you ask the old Eliotic question, ‘to what purpose disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves.’ Juice is an immensity in conception, it’s a climate change novel and the people being described in this passage are, with a riddling complexity, the enemies of the good, or so we are led to believe. But the wonder and the horror of Tim Winton’s conception allows for an ethical attitude that is bewildering and confusing.
Winton is apparently taken aback by people who read the start of the novel and are immediately reminded of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But should we be? We start reading Juice and we are confronted with a narrator, a silent young girl and a sinister and sardonic listener, an underground character who is, in a graphically fallen world, an unbeliever.
But at some level we know where we are, we have been somewhere a bit like this before and the author can hardly complain when the reader immediately says, ‘Ah, an end of the world novel’.
But let’s leave that