Tim Winton self-deprecatingly describes his latest book as “a novel about a bloke in a hole telling stories while he still can”. Of course, this epic dystopian tale is far more than that. A stunning addition to the growing cli-fi genre, Juice took Winton seven years to complete. It follows The Shepherd’s Hut (2018), a coming-of-age story set in the saltlands of Western Australia.
A prolific author, Winton has won the Miles Franklin award four times. I discovered his work in 1999 when I was blown away by a five-hour stage adaptation of his 1991 novel Cloudstreet, about two families sharing a house in a Perth suburb, at Riverside Studios in London. His Booker-shortlisted 2001 novel Dirt Music, rooted in a fishing community in WA, was adapted into a film directed by Gregor Jordan in 2019.
Juice must be his darkest novel yet. Set in an apocalyptic world some time in the future, it sees a man and a girl, fellow refugees, drive a solar-powered rig across a devastated landscape. They wear scarves over their faces as protection against the scorching sun and floating drifts of ash. When they arrive at an abandoned prospecting camp, they are met by a man with a crossbow who propels them down a disused mineshaft and locks them in a wire enclosure. Trapped in the gloom, the unnamed narrator begins his story. Recalling Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, he attempts to distract the stranger and prolong their survival.
The man describes how he was raised by his widowed mother in Western Australia on a remote plain. They were self-reliant homesteaders who grew their own crops, which they traded at the local market. Then came the climate catastrophe that wreaked untold havoc – during the summer months it became so hot they had to live below ground, surviving the inevitable claustrophobia by smoking “choof” (cannabis) to take the edge off things. At 17, the man was recruited as a “volunteer” in “The Service”, a secret resistance group. They educated him about the past, sparing him nothing, leaving him dumbfounded by the truth: “This idea that our travails were the result of others’ actions had never occurred to me… to be told that my trials were not random accidents but deliberate acts undertaken with the knowledge of their consequences? … It was infuriating to the point of derangement. It was impossible to imagine that humans had knowingly let this happen.”
The Service trained its operators to travel far and wide in order to eliminate descendants of the clans and corporations who contributed to the destruction of the planet: “The empire that poisoned the air and curdled the seas… that wreaked the chaos our ancestors had to contend with… The heat. The lost places. Lost people. The mass extinctions. Such is the legacy of this empire, these people.”
Soon after his educational rite of passage, the narrator met his wife-to-be, Sun, who is from the city, and they had a child, Ester: “a child conceived underground and born under an open sky”. Winton weaves their love into the darker strands of the story – the quieter moments of contemplation they share are a welcome distraction from the horrifying descriptions of murder and mayhem. “Juice” is the battery life needed to power their home and transport, but it also refers to the courage, love and energy required to endure the bleakest of times. But the narrator’s loyalty to The Service put a strain on their relationship and, unable to resist their call, he continued to disappear for weeks at a time, carrying out orders until the inevitable breakdown of his relationship and the homestead.
Winton offers a salutary warning of the future that awaits us if we continue to ignore the climate crisis, and his book serves as a powerful call to action. I read Juice while Hurricane Milton rampaged across Florida, floods devastated northern Nigeria and foul black balls washed up on Sydney’s beaches. Awakening to the news, it would often take me a few minutes to disentangle what was truth and what was Winton’s sharply written fiction. His anger is palpable. His eloquence has a potency that would be diluted in nonfiction. At more than 500 pages, Juice is a mighty, sometimes challenging, read, but an essential one.
• Juice by Tim Winton is published by Picador (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
