Spotlit on Tim Winton

I realize the lit portion of my blog has been somewhat lacking due to the influx of better and better jams, and the relative absence of good fiction out there. When I was down under, my sister turned me onto an Aussie writer Tim Winton, and his novels Breath (Penguin, 2008) and Cloudstreet (Penguin 1991). Two very different novels in almost every angle, but somewhat familiar in their apparent disconnect.

The character in Breath is a middle-aged paramedic who encounters a ghost from his adolescence in the form of a teen thrill gone wrong. Readers are transported back to the beginning of Bruce's friendship with insatiable risk-taking Loonie and the old surfer hero Sando who takes both young surfers under his wing. The language is brief, tragically clear. It's a quick read, and offers a lot of those "surprises" for which space and expectation is made early on. Specifically the story spoke to me on the levels of youth and the addiction to risk, the fear of mediocrity and the threat of being lost to the eons of ordinary. And to these extents it's very sexually driven, the danger, the bliss, the life pulsing through a skull and crossbones.

(excerpt)

Shoulder to shoulder in the cab, Loonie and I exchanged furtive looks. There was something of the classroom about Sando, the stink of chalk on him when he got going, but my mind was racing. I'd already begun to pose those questions to myself and feel the undertow of their logic. Was I serious? Could I do something gnarly, or was I just ordinary? I'll bet my life that despite his scorn Loonie was doing likewise. We didn't know it yet, but we'd already imagined ourselves into a different life, another society, a state for which no raw boy has either words or experience to describe. Our minds had already gone out to meet it and we'd left the ordinary in our wake.

(p. 94)

I'm only about halfway through Cloudstreet, but already it's as if it were written by an entirely different writer.

The cheeky Aussie humor is abounding, but for starters, it's concerned with about ten major characters, all

of whom get POV in the third...except one, the boy named Fish whose heart stopped when he fell overboard

the fishing boat and got caught in the net. He survives, albeit with scrambled eggs for brains. His sections (the novel

is divided amongst the characters and the two families living together by small headed vignettes) are by far the most

beautiful and the most wrenching. They are written in second person, as a conversation across some great divide and always

addressed to Fish. Is "I" the author? I tend to doubt, as it would be tremendously risky with all the other characters

involved, to suddenly spring some sort of authorial involvement and crowd the novel.

At the risk of total literary blasphemy (and giddy is the thought!), I say these two juxtaposed works remind me

of none other than Joyce's Dubliners and Ulysses. Think about it. If I were to introduce Winton to a classroom, I would

most likely give them Breath to cut their teeth before they jump into a dual-family historical epic like Cloudstreet.

The stories in Dubliners mirror the close scope and developed private interiors of the Bruce character. (I think

Bruce and the boy from Arabia would have a fine time bitching about girls and sexual competence.) The

sheer breadth, volume, involvement and elevated-low-brow wash of language in Cloudstreet is an instant

likeness to the one-day spectacle that is Ulysses, the novel which Joyce claimed contained not a single extraneous

word. Deliberate is the word we're looking for, and we're sticking to the one, thanks J.J. I've stumbled

across some effortless beauty on page 164:

(excerpt)

Across the planes all things still play themselves out, all fun and fear, all the silliness and quaking effort,

all the bickering and twitching, all the people going about the relentless limited endeavour of human

business, and the sight of your body rolling like that, bursting with voice and doubleness, reminds you that the

worlds are still connected, the lives are still related and the Here still feels the pangs of history.

Obsessed as I am with "relentless limited endeavours" and of course the "pangs of history,"

this passage was meant just for me...and Fish, apparently. It's worthy of note that in spite of the grand

scope and the way the family names (Pickles and Lamb) are difficult at first to assign to the characters'

first names, one becomes very quickly entangled in the matters of the two trying to live under the same

roof during a time of great economic depression in Australia.

Oh, and flipping over my copy here, I notice Elizabeth Ward of the Washington Post, no less, has

already paid tribute to my undergraduate mentor: "Cloudstreet gets you inside the very skin of post-war working-class Australians the way Joyce makes you feel

like a turn-of-the-century Dubliner..."

She's right, but not as right as I am, of course, about the two novels back-to-back. And then there's

the wordplay...

I'll decide when I get to the end of this one if anyone else should bother reading it. I highly recommend

the first half, however, and it is up to you whether you'd like to continue on, asphyxiate your breath with the

witching rhythm of Winton's phrasing and the quivering potential for tragedy.