Green terror

Almost as much as he is admired for his sea-salted vernacular novels of coastal Western Australia, Tim Winton is admired for being Tim Winton. People admire his publicity-shyness and the fact that he’d rather be surfing than writing. In the nature television miniseries he wrote and narrated, Ningaloo Nyinggulu (2023), Winton spoke about the oil industry with a trammelled anger that tested but did not break the Attenboroughian mould; he was admired for it. It would be understandable, in his mid-sixties, if Winton decided to ease into late style, make another poised documentary and await further animals to be named after him (the first was a fish). Instead he has published a future-set fossil-fuel revenge fantasy filled with sand and gore, and called it Juice.

Winton started young, and fast: three novels drafted at university, one published on graduation in 1982, and seven books on the shelves before the decade was out. His earliest influences were the writers of the southern and western US. Their regional specificity provided a model of how to write against the centripetal force of literary-industrial capitals – both Sydney and Melbourne being around 2,000 miles by road from the coast where Winton was raised. Though his breakout novel, Cloudstreet (1991), was set in Perth, the coastal swathes either side of that city would provide his fictional heartland, and his trove of huskily poetic nouns: mates and citizens, utes and eskies. As if in gratitude for the role they played in his development, Winton sometimes lets his influences breach the surface of his text – the Huck Finn-like childhood in Breath (2008) plays out in a town called Sawyer. In the opening pages of Winton’s new novel, Juice, an unnamed man and child cross an ashen landscape, fleeing the murderous aftermath of some ill-defined apocalypse. RIP Cormac McCarthy.

When the man and child are ambushed and imprisoned by a crossbow-wielding traveller, the man attempts to stave off doom by telling the story of his life. The Western Australia in which he grew up, we learn, was already ravaged by catastrophe. The soil of his family homestead was “brewed” from dust and shredded fowl; cities were enclosed by sea walls; the oceans were full of people fleeing “the death belt of the tropics”. Winton’s characters have always existed in telling relationship to their environment – some as blue-collar diviners of pillaged sea floors and abandoned mining sites; others more unwittingly, as conditions nudge them into seeing the world around them now as a repository of fellow life, now as a plunderable resource. It does, though, feel disappointing to watch the author slip into a rote eco-apocalyptic repertoire, the power of which has been sapped over the past decade not only by overuse in fiction, but also by the migration of its storylines to the news. The complicating plot swerve is welcome when it comes.

We learn that in his teens, while visiting a local hamlet, the storyteller was spirited into an improvised screening room and shown a slideshow of an age before an event called “the Terror”. This was our own age, of course, with its “sleek cars in wild colours. Huge, padded suits. Glass-faced helmets”. The world in which he grew up was possessed by a sense of its own cursedness, but unreflective about the causes. On that day, in that hamlet, the boy learnt what few still know: the current condition of Earth is the result of a criminal regime of extraction perpetrated during the age depicted in the slideshow. The perpetrators’ most direct and unrepentant descendants now live in splendid isolation, in oceanic monopods and desert bunkers, where they keep slaves and hatch revanchist plots. The secretive institution – “the Service” – into which the storyteller was subsequently initiated exists to hunt down such descendants and “acquit” or “interdict” them. When it comes to sci-fi-tinged literature, everyone knows what a neutral-sounding transitive verb means. Forget the speculative fictions of melancholic environmental warning: the novel of bloody eco-reckoning is here.

Blood is hardly a new subject for Winton, though it is easy to forget just how gruesome some of his novels are, perhaps because the violence he depicts is so finely attuned to its environment – technologically, socially – that, when it enters the stream of events, it does so without splashing. But really: his characters have been impaled, drowned and crushed; they’ve suffered obscure fungal conditions and mesothelioma and bungled erotic asphyxiations, and car crashes, and car crashes, and car crashes. The world of Juice offers new opportunities for his study of brokenness – an ear “melted to a brown stub”, the “ragged hinge” of a smashed tibia – but also for the subtler horror of sickness worn plain by its ubiquity (“white scab”, “pink canker”). The planet itself is ruptured and bruised, ill. Place, so important to Winton, has separated into its constituent parts of location and matter. The homestead sits among “two hundred klicks of rocks and red dirt”, “north of the twenty-third parallel”. Most life exists in short bursts, wriggling briefly into being after floods.

While the chronic violence of environmental collapse is rendered graphically, the acute stuff of the Service’s missions passes in clinical euphemism. Just as often as Winton has examined the breaking of bodies, he has examined the healing of them, and in their self-perception at least, the assassins in this book are not bloodthirsty avengers, but successors to the author’s many nurses and paramedics – they seek to “inoculate the future against the pestilence of the past”. The lexicon of his future (“volunteer”, “the Terror”, “comrade”) reminds us that this is as much about politics as ecology, and raises the prospect that Juice is in part a rare fictional study of revolutionary violence – its mentalities, possibilities and limitations. In a recent essay that underscored this connection by analyzing climate crisis in relation to anti-colonial struggles, Winton expressed wariness towards Frantz Fanon’s idea of “cleansing” violence. Writing as a novelist, he is not obliged to offer such disclaimers, and when the names of exterminated oil dynasties are sung victoriously in Juice, readers may feel a flicker of bloody-minded catharsis: “O! Oh! / Aramco, Sunoco, Conoco, Rio-Rio, Chevron / Sinopeco, Shell-o Shell-o”.

Back on the homestead, the narrator’s mother and wife suppose him to be going away on frequent scrap-hunting trips. The pair are tough, wise and strong, and you can hardly fault that, but there is a studied caution in the composition of both characters that made me suspect Winton has responded to recent, modest criticism about his writing of women with tactical retreat rather than the daring self-scrutiny that is merited. All the same, the climax of the storyteller’s tale emerges powerfully from the interplay of domestic secrets on the homestead. A further climax awaits in the frame narrative, which flickers into view occasionally, reminding us that some of what we are hearing may be Scheherazadean exaggeration and inviting comparison with that great Australian novel of bullshitting, Peter Carey’s Illywhacker (1985). As the narrator of Juice puts it to his captor: “Hot air, comrade. But haven’t we both been borne aloft by exactly that?”

The deeper you get, the closer Winton’s new novel seems to its predecessors. One of his enduring themes is the nature of inheritance, in character, capital and memory. Juice returns to this theme from an unexpected angle. We are multiply-great-grandparents, known by the world we have bequeathed. The post-apocalyptic humans in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980) marvel at their forebears’ civilization. In Juice the narrator looks back in anger, examining himself for traces of the “odious ancestry” he hunts down in others. “Jesus, sometimes I can feel him in me like some kind of poison”, says Jim Buckridge of his violent, dead father, in Winton’s Dirt Music (2001). Compare that with the storyteller in Juice, having learnt of his world’s secret history: “Jesus, the notion that my burdens were, in essence, other people’s sins?” Perhaps this is late style after all, just heat-warbled in the genre shift.

Tim Winton is an optimist of sorts, so there is a route out. In Dirt Music, “juice” means petrol. Here it encompasses all kinds of biological and mechanical energy, as well as something broader – resolve, moral courage. Before joining the Service the narrator had “been taught from birth to submit to fate”. Juice is the ability to do otherwise.

Tom Seymour Evans is a writer and researcher based in London

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