When Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, imagining an American theocracy that subjugated women, she made a rule for herself: she would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some place or time. George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in the aftermath of the second world war, as a warning against totalitarian governments. Tim Winton’s latest book, Juice, written and published amid wildfires and hurricanes and melting ice caps, is his first dystopian novel and not only a brutal reflection of the times, but possibly as enduring as those two books.
I suspect the flame of this beautiful novel has been flickering in Winton all his career. As he wrote in The Turning, “the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.” In The Shepherd’s Hut: “God is what you do, not what or who you believe in. When you make good you are an instrument of God. Then you are joined to the divine, to the life force to life itself.” Winton’s love and awe of characters shaped out of the Australian continent, and the land itself, makes this book distinctly his. And yet it also breaks new ground, as if a lifetime of paying close attention has gathered in this epic story.
