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.
Ordinarily, I prefer my dystopia told by Bipoc writers – Octavia E Butler, the afrofuturist NK Jemisin, the Noongar writer Claire G Coleman and the Waanji author Alexis Wright, among others. However, Winton has walked a tightrope across a canyon in writing Juice; he has seen 60,000 years of writing on the cave wall, the old fire, the midden shells, and he has told a story with respect for a people who have already been displaced, disfranchised and dispossessed. He honours their country and their dignity in an imagined future, without denying the intergenerational effects of European colonialism. Winton has managed to tell their story within the story of the newly displaced, disfranchised and dispossessed – which, in Juice, is all of humanity. This is generous writing; there’s so much heart on the page, and so much terrible inheritance for everyone to endure, that there’s no need for lines to be drawn. That Winton’s sympathy for the working class extends to the marginalised, there’s no doubt.
In Juice, we arrive in a scorching future within a Scheherazade narrative where our unnamed narrator is attempting to yarn his way out of capture. His story is thrilling from beginning to end: he has come of age in the shadow of epochs and events – “the Hundred Years of Light”, the time of “the Terror”, “the Dirty World”, crimes and punishments occurring in a gradually heating world. The narrator tells the story of his boyhood, his discovery of the truth of this broken world and his quest for revenge, but also companionship, family and something enduring in the near uninhabitable landscape.
Winton’s writing is practical and economical, tender for passages on end and then surprisingly sharp, like a mother’s slap. There’s that Australianness he’s been famed for since Cloudstreet but there’s also reminiscences of writers from Barjavel to Verne to Camus. And yet Winton’s style and story is undoubtedly his own. He says so much in the little his characters do say – there’s beautiful throwaway dialogue in Juice, like, “wringing your hands won’t make water”. Or, on finding his mother’s possession of a child’s drawing: “Then it dawned on me. Maybe I’d drawn it. Or maybe my father. Perhaps as a girl she drew it herself. The important thing is, she carried it. And now it’s me carrying it. We’ve consecrated it. Made it an icon, you understand?” Or on an ordinary day, taking in the new world: “Our world was over. And yet the breeze kicked on, rifling through the cowlings, stirring the turbines into life as if none of that mattered.”
Often the characters seem guided by a master choreographer; in a moment of tragedy, the narrator spots his mother and notes: “She gave a short, bleak wave. I sank onto the step, to spare myself the disgrace of falling.” Passed down are the martyred songlines of mythologised earthly crimes, committed by surnames seen on today’s billionaires index. The narrator sings in a mournful, solitary moment: “I sang until my throat burnt. Until it felt as if I were coughing up a second sun. There was no one there to hear me. And that was a mercy. But also, another reason to mourn.”
There’s a TAG Hungerford quality to Winton’s writing – eloquently rural, rusty, and moralistic. The sentimentality in his depiction of the bush, the beast and the bloke has been met with alienation in some circles; here, one cannot help but feel bereft for all of that to go to dust. His detail on the line, his phrasing, are often beautiful in their foreignness, like passages of the Bible or some other saga. When Juice really gets going, about 100 pages in, the terrain opens up and grips the reader. The pages that bristle with pace and urgency are the ones that are densely honest.
Ray Bradbury said that when he wrote Fahrenheit 451 that he combined something he hated (book burning in Nazi Germany) with something he loved (libraries). Winton has simultaneously written a definitive love letter to his country and hate mail to those who lay waste to the Earth.
I imagine Winton in the midst of writing this book, watching the tides change off the Indian Ocean, the desert at his heels and hellish environmental stats on his mind, and crying out. His grief and anger is writ large.
Juice is a masterful story for the ages. It will keep you awake through the night, reading by privileged bulb and, come daylight, when one closes the covers over these 513 pages, there is no doubt about what condition this orbiting rock will be in for our children, their grandchildren. There is anger and revenge to reckon with but Winton carries the reader all the way along. Juice is a book to hold close in the whip of hot wind, to commiserate with, to sing with. To read and weep.
Juice by Tim Winton is out now in Australia ($49.99) and in the UK on 17 October (Pan Macmillan, £22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
