"The Riders" by Tim Winton

An audio book. Fred Scully, a 30 y.o. Australian who'd been odd-jobbing around Europe for 2 with his wife Jennifer and daughter Billie is doing up an 18th century Irish cottage that his wife impulsely decided to buy. No power or plumbing. He grew up on a farm. She gave up a good job (that she hated) to go to Europe. She'd written poetry in Paris and painted in Greece. She's expecting another child. Jennifer and Billie go back to Australia to sell their house. Fred befriends Pete the Post who helps with the work. Pete's brother Conner is an electrician who is killing himself with drink. 200m from the village is a gothic castle. When Fred goes to meet them at the airport, only Billie (7.5 years old, precocious) is there. She says nothing for hours. Fred finds out that Jennifer got as far as London. He guesses that she went to Greece, so off he goes.

She's not in Hydra where they stayed. A dog attacks Billie, wounding her face. Alex is found at the foot of a cliff. Fred's likely to be a suspect. He hires a boat to get him to the mainland through a storm, gets a ferry to Florence. On the ferry he comes to know Irma, who claims to have seen his wife. He receives a telegram telling him to be at the Tuileries, alone at noon on 23rd Dec, so off he goes to Paris. Waiting for the rendezvous he sees a hooded women approach then turn away. He chases in vain. Billie gets a fever so Fred chases some old Parisian contacts. They're unfriendly. Somehow his credit card becomes unvalid. He thinks Jennifer might have gone off with their money. She might have gone off with another woman. When he comes across Irma again he can't believe it's chance. He spends a night with her. Drunk, he sneaks off in the night with her cash. Billie has to look after him when he pops into Notre Dame's midnight Xmas mass n the way to the train station. In Amsterdam, following a hunch, he tries to find Parisian photographer Dominique's houseboat. He gets drunk and spends a night in a cell. Billie finds the address. The houseboat hasn't been visited for a while. It's shipping water. He finds a familiar jumper there. She finds photos, including ones of her. In the final chapter they're back in Ireland.

Until I read the reviews I didn't understand the significance of the title - the "Wild Hunt".

Billie's PoV gradually emerges. Winton can chain together short clauses of description or can let landscape gradually soak in. He uses "forlorn" and "plangent" rather too often. His style includes words of wisdom (in Ireland "every field a name, every path a stile. Everything possible had been tried out there. It wasn't the feeling you had looking out on his own land. In Australia you looked out and saw the possible, the space, the maybes;" "the only end some things have is the end you give them"; when he explores Amsterdam on Xmas morning there are "no crowds to hide in while he gets his bearings") and some imagery ("the mist hung on him like a bedwetter's blanket", "the world swung on its anchor").

Other reviews

• Kirkus reviews
• Good reads
• jud's jottings

"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

"Breath" by Tim Winton

An audio book. Australia. Paramedic Bruce (a quiet man, separated, with grown daughters) arrives at a house where a mourning mother is beside an asphyxiated boy, Aran. She assumes it's suicide. He thinks it's an accident.

We go back to when Bruce was 11, growing up in Soya. He had boring UK-immigrant parents and a daring mate, Looney, who lived in a pub. Bruce had a sense of beauty, bussed to school and liked books (a refuge becoming a pleasure). They learned to surf together with fin-less boards. Bruce's father was against it. When they weren't surfing they watched surfers and rescues. They dare each other. They see who can hold their breath the longest. By the time they're 13 they've got to know Sando, an "old guy" (in his 30s) who lives with his young sulky US wife Eva in a wooden house. Hippy, he takes trips to Indonesia when he's not on the beach. He gets sent many surfboards. My guess is that they're a way to import drugs.

The boys discover that Sando was a surf-mag model. Eva used to ski but bust her knee and has a limp. Looney thinks she's holding his hero Sando back. Bruce wonders if Eva's worried about how Sando's accepting the adulation. Looney left school at 15 and started work. Bruce and Sandy have long chats. Then Sando and Looney go on a long holiday to Indonesia without telling Bruce first. He feels betrayed. The 3 of them go down the coast to a challenging wave. Bruce bottles out. School's not going well either. One morning he tries the local challenge, Old Smokey, alone. He succeeds first time, fails the next and loses his board.

Eva was a top free-styler before the accident. She thinks Sando likes being idolised, that he fears being old. She sleeps with Bruce while the others are away. She's excited by self-asphyxiation - a bag and a strap. He doesn't want to join in.

Bruce (15) gets Eva pregnant. Sando returns. Looney never does. Sando assumes the baby's his. They move away. Bruce's father dies. Bruce settles down in a quiet marriage, has a breakdown and for a while is instutionalise. Later Bruce blames Eva for his problems. In the papers he reads that Sando's become an inspirational businessman and that Eva's found dead - self-hanged. Bruce trains as a paramedic - thrills and a responsibility that gains respect from his daughters.

There's much description of waves and landscape, of "feeling alive" when taking risks. The words, in Bruce's voice, can sound over-written - "the decommissioned buildings seemed hunkered down, besieged by sky and sea and landscape. The steep isthmus beyond that was choked by thickets of coastal heath".

Other reviews

• Patrick Ness
• Goodreads
• Magdalena Ball (The breath motif is everywhere. There’s Eva’s breath in a plastic bag; Pikelet’s father’s Apnoea at night; the breath holding between Pikelet and Loonie that prefigures their surfing exploits; the exhalation of didgeridoo that narrates the story; and above all, the breath that is, metaphorically and actually, life itself. In the end, the journey becomes the point, and despite the damage, the breathing and dancing continue, creating meaning and value that needs “no explanation”.)

"The Turning" by Tim Winton (2005)

Stories from Granta, Harvard Review, Harpers, Threepenny Review, etc. An audio book ably read. Set in Angelus in Australia, by the sea. Silos, fishing boats, food processing, water shortages. Interlinking stories. People sense something, then the moment's gone. The characters' internal monlogue is often over-articulate. The dialogue's more authentic.

• Big World - When the narrator arrived and started school, Biggie saved him from a bully. Since then he'd helped Biggie with his school work. They both failed the exam. They buy a van and leave without telling people. They pick up a plump girl thicker than Biggie. Watching how Biggie treats her makes the narrator aware of how he treated Biggie. The van catches fire. Their escape from school failure fails.
• Abbreviation - Vic, 13, goes camping on the beach with his family for New Years Eve. He meets Melanie, 16, who's bored too. She's missing part of a finger - a farming accident. They kiss.
  I like it
• Aquifer - A man reads that human remains have been found in a swamp where he used to live. He immediately drives 5 hours to be there. When he was a boy he saw a bully from his school drown there, the body never recovered. He thinks about how water evaporates and is drunk, how dead bodies are recycled. The same happens with time - "Time is in us, not behind"
• Damaged Goods - The narrator's the wife of Vic. She feels ignored. She relates how Vic liked a girl at school with a vivid birth mark on her face, and she knows about the Melanie incident. She wonders what deformity attracts him to her. She says that Melanie wrote a poem about 2 girls in a fire. Years later Viv met Melanie with her girlfriend. That night the 2 of them died in a car accident.
• Small Mercies - Dyson returns to Angelus with his 4 y.o. son after his wife's suicide. The parents of Faye, his school sweetheart, ask him to see her. She has a daughter that they're looking after which Faye's completing rehab. When he rejects her offer of sex she threatens to tell her parents that she had an abortion at 15 and that Dyson's mother paid for it.
• On her knees - When his mother, a domestic cleaner, is accused of stealing from a client, a law graduate helps her
• Cockleshell - Breakie becomes briefly obsessed with 15 y.o. Agnes as she spears dogfish on the mudflats in the evening. She's not doing it for money. She's not interested in him. She ends up being a surgeon.
• The turning - Raylene is friends with Cheri on a caravan site. Raylene's husband Dan is battering her. When Cheri and her husband move to a house, Cheri regularly visits. She wonders what the secret of their happiness is. She discovers that they're religious. After an incident, Raylene has to have stitches. The nurse's husband is Max's boss. He sacks Max.
• Sand - Max (12) tries to suffocate brother Frank (10) in a sand dune tunnel. He escapes.
  Too minor.
• Family - Frank, having walked off a football pitch in mid-game, returns to Angelus, evading the sports journalists. Surfing, he meets his brother Max who says how useless and cowardly he is. A shark attacks Max. Frank tries to save him
• Long, clear view - Vic's family moves to Angelus. His father's a policeman. He never quite integrates. To comfort himself he holds his father's rifle. He does a lot of watching. He feels that the locals are against him. When alone, he loads the rifle.
• Reunion - Vic and his wife (it's her PoV) go with Vic's mother to a family reunion. They find the house empty, end up in the pool, then realise they've the wrong house. Back home they have a revealing talk about families. "shiny bikes lay strewn askew on summer lawns" and "a servility that bewildered all of us" sound over-literary
• Commission - After her diagnosis, Vic's mother asks him to find her father, who's been gone 27 years, so she could see him one last time. Vic finds him. He's been sober for years, waiting to hear from her, feeling guilty. He thinks that Viv's mother really wants Viv and his father to meet up again. Vic suspects that his work drove his father to despair. The narrative flow's good.
• Fog - I like this. Vic's father's been in Angelus a year. He realises that the police are corrupt. He's become a secret drinker. He's called to help at a mountain rescue. A young female reporter teams up with him. They find the climber unconscious, legs broken as night falls. She takes a photo before helping. Their radio's broken. She's scared. They exchange stories. He takes her camera, not to confiscate it but planning to use its flash to signal to others their whereabouts.
• Boner McPharlin's Moll - A 15 y.o. goes round with the bad boy of town. No sex, and not much talk. They're both lonely. She enjoys her reputation. She uses words like "assuaged" and phrases like "I'd embraced the safety of the medium". She turns over a new leaf. Later, she visits him in hospital after baddies (or police?) broke his legs. He opens up about his mother, his inability to read or swim. He's never done much wrong. He teaches her to drive. Charley becomes her boyfriend but she prefers Boner's company, though she hardly sees him. After her exams, he organises a party - "Pink Floyd was blasting across the beach". They throw offal in the sea to attract sharks. After Uni she returns briefly. She's become a high-power diplomatic advisor. She has female lovers. She's called back to accompany him to a mental home. She looks around his shack, finds porn with pictures of her head taped on the bodies. She visits him about once a year. To the end he says he only did the driving. 4 policemen are at the funeral. As much a portrait of Boner than an autobiography.
• Immunity - The narrator approaches a 15 y.o. boy on a train. He's in a cadet uniform. She's in the year behind him at school. He hasn't noticed her. She's been following him for 18 months and knows he's lonely. They talk about death, close shaves. Neither knows that Vic's sister is dying of meningitis. She never spoke to him (Vic) again.
  A rather weak piece.
• Defender - Gail (34) and Vic (44) are off to meet friends for the weekend (though he has no real friends, thinks Gail. She also thinks that his only vivid experiences date from adolescence). There's tension between them. He's recently had shingles twice. She confesses to an affair - "The forest sighed". When they arrive at Fen and Daisy's he realises that they knew about Gail's affair (with a sleasy hotel manager). Fen and Daisy have given up being vets to look after a farm. Vic admires their decision. Vic goes for a lie-down, thinks through the day so far. He knows it seems strange that he's more upset about his professional reputation than being cuckolded. Meanwhile Gail and Daisy discuss Gail's future. Gail's become religious again. Vic starts talking to Daisy's daughter, awkwardly. Later, Vic tells Gail about some past events whose relevance she doesn't understand. She was partly hoping for anger rather than self-analysis. Vic tries Fen's gun with clay pigeons, again and again. He impresses the kids.
  Not one of the best pieces, though it ends well.

Other reviews

• Ann Skea
• James Smith (a collection of overlapping stories set mainly in one town, Winton again gives us fractured lives, drifting relationships, and several shades of the violence that can erupt from the bitterness of failure.
• Kirkus reviews
• Magdalena Ball