Archive for the ‘Fiction: Australian’ Category

In The Winter Dark by Tim Winton

ISBN: 0330412590
140 pages
published in 1988.

I picked up In The Winter Dark as a potential candidate for a paper I’ll be writing this summer with the help of my advisor on the environment in Australian literature. I’ve read books by Winton before — you can check out my review of Dirt Music. I did not enjoy In The Winter Dark as much as Dirt Music. For one, I feel like the writing was not as mature — but the story was still wonderfully crafted and given the limits enforced by the small size of the book, the characters were very well developed and interesting. At times it also seemed a bit vague and lazy, but it’s hard to tell if that’s an actual fault or my own lack of perception.

The story revolves around four individuals living in a small valley in Western Australia — a married couple, a young girl and a middle-aged man who has moved into the area after retiring. Of the four, only the couple are native to the area and as such are fairly protective over their way of life, viewing the other two as outsiders. However, they are drawn together by mutual loss in the form of some brutally slaughtered pets and livestock. They must work together to find the creature that is responsible, but it is lurking in the dark somewhere, amidst the trees and the wild, and they are not sure what it might be. As it turns out, the trouble from the outside seems to reflect the secrets they’re harboring inside of themselves and they must solve these first.

Most of the story is narrated by Maurice Stubbs, who has lived in the valley with his wife most of her life and all of his. His narration is interesting in the way it sheds light on the other characters in the book, but due to the state of his mind (that is better understood by the end of the story, but which we get insight into as the story trots along) we are inclined to wonder about the authenticity of his descriptions of the events and of the other characters thoughts and actions. There is definitely a supernatural twist to the story, but the extent of it and the reality of it within the context is really up to interpretation, and I believe Winton intended it to be that way.

Despite being down one terrier in a particularly gruesome fashion barely after the novel has begun, Ida Stubbs was (at least for me) the strongest character in the story. She is wise, yet funny in a very down-to-Earth sort of way. She is very flawed, but she seems to accept these flaws much more than anyone else does, and this may be why I was so taken by her character — for all the good it does her, as you will see.

And simply because this is something I should begin thinking about, this book was really wonderful to choose for this project and I’m hoping it winds up being useable for me. (I’ve been advised to try and narrow the scope of what I’m doing, but damnit, it’s hard! There’s so much good material.) Here’s a good passage:

“Ida Stubbs heard shots and flinched enough to drop the preserve jar and it smashed at her feet. She leant against the sink a moment and looked out the window to the forest up the hill. Another shot; she heard it soar over the valley and it gave her a flittery feeling she didn’t often get anymore, that sense of being small, of not really belonging. She’d had it in her chest the day she’d come here after the wedding. And she got it each time she brought a baby back from the district hospital. She’d stand here at the window and feel new and strange, as though maybe she should get back in the car and take this helpless child to a town, a city, somewhere where the trees didn’t stand over you, where the swamp didn’t sit there brewing at your doorstep, where people might drive past occasionally and wave on their way to somewhere else.”

I guess I’ll leave you guys with that. Despite the slightly lower rating on this book (in comparison to Dirt Music) I totally recommend it. It is intense, suspenseful and strangely compelling — it’s also a short book, so if anything it won’t steal away much of your time!

Dirt Music by Tim Winton

ISBN: 0743228480
416 pages
published in 2001.

There is really no way to describe how much I enjoyed this book. Reading the back synopsis in Barnes & Noble intrigued me, but I wasn’t really sure how I’d take to it as it isn’t really my normal style. I was so impressed. The story really wraps you in and keeps you going. I wound up reading it slowly so for a while it was just this really interesting, lovely thing I could return to whenever I wanted it. So I’m a bit sad it’s over.

The story centers around Georgie Jutland, her husband, Jim Buckridge – the most prosperous fisherman in the town they live in – and Luther Fox, an outcast that lives just outside of town that has been making his living by fishing illegally. Faced with dead-end marriage with someone she finds she barely knows, Georgie starts seeing Lu secretly. With her background as a nurse and an ongoing need to take care of others that George herself describes as the failing point of all of her relationships, she begins uncovering a bit of what has caused Lu to retreat to the life he is currently living in a way that Jim had never bothered to. He begins to describe a life of music with his siblings and family, a life of caring for a melon farm, something comfortable despite being strained and despite the fact that his family had never had “good luck” and was always rejected by the rest of the people in town. At least before a terrible accident that his entire family.

However, when the people in the town find out about Lu’s activities and destroy his car and kill his dog, Lu decides to take off across Western Australia to try and find a place where he cannot be tracked down. He’s sure that Jim is after him and hides out far in the bush to escape him. Meanwhile, Georgie agonizes over her failed relationship with Jim and the life she might have been able to lead with Lu. Jim seems to want to make amends for his past, which was anything but kind, and convinces Georgie to take off and find Lu, wherever he may be.

Winton is one of the best writers I’ve ever encountered. The story is compelling and it’s very easy to find yourself attached to his characters, even the ones you are not quite sure you like. I’ll be reading Cloudstreet next, and I’m excited to see how his writing style works in other stories. He really is wonderful at description, which was especially important for a story like this that relies so heavily upon the Western Australian landscape. There are descriptions of plants and animals and land everywhere in the book.

The Young Desire It by Kenneth “Seaforth” Mackenzie

ISBN: 0207162840
330 pages
published in 1937.

(I apologize for the cover used to represent this book – it was really difficult to find anything at all. Scanning my copy would have just produced the same image.)

I picked this book up as part of the research I’ve been doing lately into LGBT Australian literature. This is one of those cornerstone books in the field. It’s intriguing for the time it was published, the author and the popular and critical response to it. It actually wound up winning an Australian award when it was published, although that is more likely due to the fact that the protagonist wound up choosing a heterosexual relationship rather than the homosexual one that he was presented with throughout the novel.

The story takes place on a boarding school (quintessential setting for a gay story involving youth taking place in Australia) where young Charles Fox has just enrolled. He winds up getting the interest of a teacher there, Penworth, who finds himself developing something of an unethical attraction to him and begins, without really realizing entirely what he’s doing, pressuring him into returning some sort of affection to him as well. Charles doesn’t realize what is going on initially, although, after he meets a young girl during a vacation at home and begins a relationship with her, he eventually rejects Penworth when he realizes the sort of interest the teacher has taken in him.

Penworth, though blatantly homosexual, is not portrayed by Mackenzie as being a devilish or unlikeable character as one would probably expect for the time period in which it was written. Yes, he is eventually rejected, but the insight we gain into Penworth’s thoughts and history makes him a character that, although we become frustrated with him often due to his foolishness and poor choices, we sympathize with. His faults are simply human faults, and though it’s unacceptable for many understandable and valid reasons for a teacher to take the sort of interest in his student as Penworth does – especially during this time and especially considering it is a homosexual attraction – we are able to recognize him as a human and thus he is not turned into some immoral entity, formed only to warn readers away from the inhuman, homosexual monster. It’s just a really fascinating book and I think perhaps it doesn’t reach as far of an audience as it should.