Quest for light in world of human darkness

Tim Winton

Picador, 16.99

TIM Winton’s short stories trace seams of doubt that spread below the surface of whole communities in Western Australia. Yet for all its confrontation with sex, drugs and sin, this book strongly affirms the human. Death is never far away - from bodies burnt in house fires to the drowning of an almost non-verbal bully, or the death by heart-attack of an outsider in an asylum.

These threads entwine together between stories, forming layers of genealogy and circumstance that resonate with a shared bleakness.

Winton creates a world that works painfully towards resolutions, and no matter how much darkness or grotesquery interrupts the quest for light, awareness ultimately surfaces.

Bizarrely, it is Angela Carter who comes to mind more than the hyper-realists one might normally equate with Winton’s approach to empirical detail and colloquial speech. Under close investigation, it becomes obvious that for all its up-close and being-there feel, Winton’s world is more mythological and unreal than we might think.

The presence of the author still crowds behind the narratives, but more as a director trying to co-ordinate the disparate threads. Ultimately, Winton’s is a deeply compassionate voice, but one that allows the irony and even cruelty of a particular situation to direct the unravelling of narrative.

These are stories about the inevitability of fate, but also about the beauty of the moment - be it a first kiss, or the mutual realisation that a dying woman’s request to her son to seek out her long-estranged husband is a way of reuniting the alienated father and son; or else, in classic Robert Burns manner, they are about seeing ourselves as others might see us.

The stories are quite filmic, and one wonders at the over-emphasis on verisimilitude with regard to props and scene-setting.

There are frequent references to brand names, evocative of a period - Ugg Boots, Fabulon, Formica, types of vehicles and so on. These are the tools of nostalgia, yet this is not a nostalgic book. Even the recollections of childhood, so vividly painted, are tainted by a sense of intrusion and loss, as in the carving of new suburbs out of bush, or the weirdness of the BBC voice on the phone giving the time.

In the occasional paranoiac reference to, or presence of, Aborigines, we get the feeling that the author is conscious they are not present enough, but that rectifying this is textually - and factually - evasive. This is a beautifully interwoven work, with enough loose threads to escape the prison of cause and effect - but one still encased in the unified vision of reward, salvation, and the potential for damnation.

It is a very Anglo-Celtic vision of the Australian south-west, and a very Protestant interaction with it. Winton’s insights into the ‘born-again’ tactics of ‘friendship’ and conversion mesh with tragic isolation and loneliness, and an apotheosis of spiritual self-knowledge comes out of horrific domestic violence.