Archive for February, 2010

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!

Atheism: A Very Short Introduction by Julian Baggini

ISBN: 0192804243
136 pages
published in 1995.

There isn’t really much to say about this book. That shouldn’t be taken to mean it was a bad book, or anything like that — I can see it serving its purpose in an introductory function very well. I’ve been seeing these Oxford UP “Very Short Introduction” books lying around bookstores here and there, and so of course I decided to pick up the one on atheism. It was pretty good. It had all of the basic framework for books about atheism (the curt reminder that we’re not immoral Satan worshippers, etc.) The book’s only real downfall is the risk that any book about a widely held philosophy runs the risk of — and that’s overgeneralizing. Baggini does a pretty commendable job controlling that, but there are still many points in the book that I got a bit frustrated because he seemed pretty willing to specify on his own behalf for opinion’s sake but seemed to shrug off slightly more positive (that whole atheism with a capital A nonsense that you hear a lot) as fundamentalist and undesirable.

But his explanations and descriptions are spot on, and he is always very focused and organized in his approach. I can see myself recommending this book to someone who asked for a good introduction to the subject.