 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
The Turning
By Tim Winton
Picador $46.00
 Tim Winton's latest work of fiction is a collection of short stories that can indeed be greatly enjoyed if read alone. But not long into the 320-page volume it becomes apparent that this unified narrative employs a group of inter-related characters whose lives converge and then veer apart over time, producing a snapshot of coastal Western Australia - classic Winton territory - in the early 1970s.
While evoking a nostalgia for the period and place, the tales have an undercurrent of sadness, and at times criminality, as with the crippling of possible drug courier Boner McPharlin by corrupt police and the tragedy of the caravan dwellers, Raelene and her abusive husband Max, a semi-employed fisherman who drinks to excess and forces sex on his battered spouse.
Like film director Mike Leigh, Winton makes extraordinary movies about ordinary people. The woman who cleans rich people's houses, the brothers who 'drove Monaros and Chargers', the farm families who holiday annually at the beach, the migrant families who built their homes on 'battlers' blocks' in the suburbs: 'The man next door murdered his wife. Up the road, near the ridge, a man invented the orbital engine and the Americans tried to ruin him. Bruno went back to Serbia to burn Albanians out of their homes; someone saw him on television.'
An unpretentious writer with an eye and ear for a good yarn, Winton looks to his own backyard, the outback and seascape, for inspiration.
'Several big waves broke outside. They took them on the head, duckdiving with their boards to escape the worst of the impact. Leaper [a fallen AFL star] relished the sluicing concussion across his back; he loved the way the force of the water prised his eyelids apart and raked through his hair like a gale.'
The most constant character is industrial lawyer, Vic Lang, son of a cop-turned-alcoholic who deserted his family to go bush. When he finds Bob Lang, his hermit father, to say his mother has been diagnosed with cancer, Vic muses, 'He was Godlike. His fall from grace was so slow as to be imperceptible, a long puzzling decline.... He just disappeared by degrees before our eyes, subsiding into a secret disillusionment I never understood, hiding the drink...'
Moving back and forward through time, viewing events through the eyes of different protagonists, Winton's multifaceted narrative portrays human frailty, courage and humour in a readily identifiable way.
- Books reviewed are available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore.
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