Aussie Odysseus

The Shepherd’s Hut, Tim Winton, Penguin

In Tim Winton’s fiction, reconciliation, sacrifice, redemption and the like work themselves out in the lives of society’s fringe-dwellers – those not usually thought of as upright, moral citizens.

In Winton’s latest novel, The Shepherd’s Hut, main character and narrator Jaxie is a teenage ‘delinquent’ from the wrong side of the tracks (literally – he lives by the railroad tracks – some heavy symbolism in a book full of it), his mother has died of cancer, and he has left school, mainly because being an obvious nuisance is the only way he can resurrect some self-worth. His one-eyed, abusive father, a Cyclops-figure who Jaxie, like Odysseus, is trying to escape, accidentally kills himself, and Jaxie takes the opportunity to finally leave his one-horse Western Australian town, heading bush like an Aussie Huck Finn. Like Odysseus, he is trying to reunite with his love after an arduous, distracted journey.

Jaxie is not the churchy type; Winton lets us know Jaxie finds it all ‘mumbo-jumbo’, he says he is not the praying type, unless a desperate longing is a form of prayer (and we are encouraged to wonder whether it might be). He has a home-grown, crude morality, and his story echoes the biblical flights of Jacob and David, whose obvious external deficiencies hide divine purpose. Although Jaxie scoffs at the idea of someone being an ‘instrument of God’, later he is told explicitly that he is just that.

Winton captures an authentic voice, with its rough-as-guts vernacular (which might make an outback trucker pause). Jaxie is disenchanted with and wary of the human world, but comfortable with surviving in the bush, where a stripping back to basics also brings one closer to the divine. Jaxie’s meeting with the occupant of the hut in the book’s title and the Wild West climax are, again, heavy with symbolism (the occupant of the shepherd’s hut provides Jaxie with a type of pastoral care, while the climax’s action takes place at a tree where feral goats are slaughtered called the ‘killing tree’, which is a wording also used for a crucifix), but they allow Winton to show how Gospel values might appear in the outcasts and ne’er-do-wells, those who in the Gospels are the recipients of the Kingdom of God.

(Originally reviewed for Crosslight.)

Pretension and self-absorption

Wayne Macauley writes Australian fiction that has a slightly mythical quality to it, and in this sense one could compare it to Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, which also heads in the direction of Marquez’s magical realism. It’s slightly dreamy, slightly unreal. Macauley’s fiction has scenarios that take the absurdities of suburbia to extremes. Interestingly though, Macauley’s prose is a long way from Winton’s. For example, Winton’s latest novel contains a description of waking: “He peeled back the lids with a gospel gasp”. It’s this sort of writing that perhaps is the reason Winton polarises readers. Some may see this as cleverly poetic. Others – I suspect Macauley would be one of them – would roll their eyes at such displays of florid craft. This is not to say Winton’s fiction is no good. Clearly he is a remarkable writer. The point is simply that Australian sounding fiction, of which Macauley and Winton would be prime candidates, can vary widely.

Macauley captured a unique voice in The Cook. His latest novel Demons (Text Publishing), a dark satire of middle class pretension and self-absorption that takes its title from Dostoyevsky’s prophetic novel, has an economic quality to the writing. Characters only give up their opinions in a superficial, dinner-party kind of way, and yet part of Macauley’s cleverness is to get across the message in such spare terms. The novel is also a vehicle (in a Canterbury Tales kind of way) for delivering more of his short stories, which, each in their own way, tell of the difficulties in escaping from a deadening urban lifestyle. Like the European writers who are his heroes – Musil, Chekhov, etc. – he skewers bourgeois vapidity, and while this can be something of a cliché for left-leaning novelists, it may well be a vital message in these times of individualism driven by governments that are becoming ever more bolder in showing their contempt for those they clearly consider society’s losers.