The end of the world is big right now. I get it: bushfires, COVID, Trump, Musk, and extremists all over social media. Cyclones in Brisbane! It feels like we live in an apocalyptic or dystopian backstory. Even respected ‘literary’ writers have been inspired to give us their version of survival after or during the end times. I have read some of them and been disappointed. You can’t dip into a genre without understanding it, even if your sentences are literary pretty.
Of course Tim Winton can do it. Winton has been nominated for the Booker, twice. He has won the Miles Franklin four times. His sentences are literary pretty. But he is also an environmental advocate. Landscape is always a character in his novels. And so, comes Juice, climate fiction at its finest. So fine; it feels predictive.
“We had our golden age in a lull, while the world was just dozing.” Tim Winton, Juice
It took me a little while to warm to it though. A man and a girl (sorry there are only two named characters in the book and it is not the man or the girl) travel across a devasted landscape in his solar-powered rig. Imagine a cross between Mad Max’s slave settlements and Cormac McCarthy’s ashen The Road. Perhaps, the man thinks, this old mine site could be a safe place, but alas, here lives the suspicious and pessimistic bowman, who takes them underground and holds them captive while the man tells his life story.
Because the man was telling his life story, I felt a distance, I was not in the here and now of the story. I wondered why Winton chose this device for the novel and perhaps it is because of the ancient role of oral storytelling in the passing along of histories as legends. The stories the people tell in Juice are the Sagas and perhaps the story of his life the man orates to the bowman on this night, while the mute but literate girl listens, will become a Saga.
“If talk was food you’d be fatter than a week-old body bag.” Tim Winton, Juice
The narrator tells of growing up with his mother as ‘successful’ homesteaders, hard-working, frugal and innovative they produce enough in the winter to trade in the local hamlet. In the lethal summer, they live underground. However, the man has a double life. He tells his wife (a character named – Sun!) he is going ‘scavenging’ but he is a member of a violent, secretive group of activists known as ‘the Service’ who seek deadly retribution on the old family dynasties and faceless corporations who still hold the wealth and technology.
“Crazy evil bastards, they’re worse than weather.” Tim Winton, Juice
This battle between good and evil, the cleansing undertaken by ‘the Service’, has uncomfortable radicalised undertones. What if that same technology used to ‘cleanse’ was used to better people’s predicament? For me, the best speculative fiction is an exploration of what it means to be human and the dehumanising of the ‘objects’ they target is just one aspect of the novel that leads to this question.
“The great mystery of people is the many ways they will deceive themselves.” Tim Winton, Juice
What is Juice? Tenacity, gumption, energy…
There were mixed feelings in Pocket Bookclub on this one, in part due to our mixed experiences with Tim Winton novels. Overall, not a re-read for me but memorable.