"Dirt Music" by Tim Winton

An audio book. Georgie, a 40 y.o. ex-nurse, has been living with Joe and his 2 young sons for 3 years. They live in White Point, an isolated fishing-town in West Australia. Once a shanty town it boomed when Rock Lobster became fashionable. Joe, 48, is well-off, a highly respected widower. Georgia likes a drink.

She sees Lu Fox illegally fishing. She's restless. She decides to leave Joe, but her car breaks down. Fox stops for her. Fox, mid-thirties, has many literary books. We learn how his musical siblings died in a traffic accident that he survived. She takes him to a hotel for a night. She returns to Joe, but keeps drinking. They need to talk

Her mother dies unexpectedly. She goes to her family. She's the oldest of 4 daughters. She dropped out of medical school after 2 years. She's still the rebel - she skinnydips in the house pool in front of nephews. Her father, a QC, had left her mother for a much younger woman. Her mother has left everything to him in her will. Joe brings the kids to the funeral. She drives back days later, going to Lu. But he's gone. She stays with Joe (who is understanding) and the boys. She find out that someone tried to kill Lu. She suspects Joe, but he says he had nothing to do with it. Nationalism and vigilantism is on the rise.

From Lu's PoV we find out how he survived. He hitches North, sends her a postcard. He shares part of the journey with a couple - the woman has terminal cancer and loves discussing books with Lu. She also like music, but he finds it too painful. He keeps going into the monsoon season, even hiring a plane, heading North so he can be alone in a place that Georgie had mentioned.

She'd hooked up with Joe because he felt so sorry for him. Now her sypathies have transferred to Lu. She inherits a yacht (ah. I thought, useful for her to make a getaway North - she's good at sailing) which she sells straight away, giving the money to a sister so she can leave her husband. She makes Fox's farm habitable, burning the clothes and possessions of his dead relatives. She spends much of her days there, reading his books and learning guitar.

Joe suddenly tells her that he's giving up work for a few months and putting the boys into boarding school so that he and her can go away, up north. He knows that Lu is up there somewhere.

Alone, Lu recalls family scenes with video/hallucinating vividness, reassessing the dead, realising that they exploited him, that their love of music wasn't as deep as his.

In the North Joe and Georgie have an overdue heart-to-heart talk about why they were together and what kind of people they wanted to be. Joe (as some kind of penance) wants to help Georgie find Lu. Lu's become a bit of a legend in the area - a wild man. With the help of a guide they find evidence of his presence. He sees them, recognises them. When they leave in a seaplane they see him in a canoe. They crash. He dives to save them. At the end Georgie gives him the kiss of life.

I like his analogies -

• "She has crowsfeet because of the sun, shadows because of everything else".
• The girls in her family looked in each mirror they passed like prisoners looking through windows.
• A man runs away like a kid at bathtime.
• A man sucks at a toke with the pleasure of a man siphoning petrol.

I like his dialogue too. I'm less keen on lonely men's ruminations in a landscape.

Other reviews

• Magdalena Ball (There are some interesting stylistics which occur in the structure of the novel, and in Winton’s narrative. While the passages taking Georgie’s point of view are all in third person, Lu’s are in first. This give’s Lu’s chapters a particularly submerged, almost stream of consciousness feel, as his clipped sentences capture the immediacy of sensation)
• themodernnovel (This is undoubtedly Winton’s best book and deserves to be better known. The quality of the writing is so superior to that of most of his contemporaries that it makes you really wonder why this book doesn’t have a greater reputation.)
• Kirkus reviews (an exhilarating multilayered amalgam of withering satire and beguiling character creation .... All this against a rich backdrop whose landscape and climate are evoked with muscular imagistic precision (as a cyclone approaches, “Lightning bleaches the trees and a waterspout rises like an angry white root from the dirt-coloured sea”).)
• Goodreads