Juice

Somewhere in Western Australia, a man and a young child in his care arrive at an old mine site. They have been travelling through a landscape devastated by climate change: searing temperatures make it impossible to travel by day. This mine is their best chance of seeking some respite from the weather, but someone has beaten them to it. The man sees he has one chance of survival: to tell his story.

This is the set up for Tim Winton’s blistering new novel, Juice. The narrator is born into a forsaken world, living on a small farm with his hard-bitten mother. Theirs is an existence of subsistence living, their survival dependent on resilience, ingenuity and a fair amount of luck. The climate is volatile, they must contend with lightning storms, flash flooding and heat domes. Although, in the face of this adversity, they are not downtrodden. They’ve come to terms with their fate.

That is until our narrator comes of age and he is shown how the world became this way. How it was transformed by an age of greed, lies and wilful destruction. He now must face the truth that his present world was made so by previous generations. There are some who are more to blame than others, and they must pay a price.

This is a Winton novel unlike any other. There are no rolling waves off lush coastline. The characters here move through apocalyptic plains and dust storms. But the writing is just as superb as we have come to expect from Winton. The pacing is propulsive, the story addictive. The characters are hard-shelled, but whole and real.

That is the brilliance of this novel. It is a highly engaging read, but there is a call to arms here too: look around and see what’s happening in the world, where we’re headed if we don’t change how we live today.