Juice
Tim Winton, Picador
There is no shortage of post-apocalypse dystopias, but Winton’s hefty eco-disaster is a cut above. An unnamed man and a mute young girl flee pursuers across the blasted landscape of future Western Australia. Looking for refuge in an abandoned mine, they are taken hostage by a stranger armed with a crossbow. The man narrates the story of his life, Scheherazade-style, in an attempt to stop this person killing them both – the tension that builds across this long novel as to whether the strategy will save them is brilliantly worked. As the night unfolds, we get the full scope of what it means to live in a ruined world, learning how the epochs of the past declined from The Hundred Years of Light to The Dirty World and The Terror. The architects of the Earth’s collapse, descendants of the corporate polluters from our time, now live in redoubts and bunkers, and part of the story follows “the Service”, a paramilitary group who hunt them down. The prose is gorgeous, as you would expect from Winton, and a passion for our beautiful planet – alongside anger at what corporations are doing to it – burns red-hot throughout.
