Books of the Month

'The Turning' by Tim Winton

The Western Australian small town of Angelus is classic Winton country. With neither the bright lights and distractions of the city, nor the rural reassurances of the country, people live out lives in the shadow of the meat-packing plant, the trailer park, a dying fishing industry. There is drinking, drug-taking, violence, and depression. There’s also intense loneliness, misunderstanding, and a whole raft of fractured families. But if taking a trip to Angelus (a fictional place, by the way) for a series of connected short stories where the same characters crop up viewed from different angles doesn’t sound like much fun, think again.

As a writer Winton has an enormous sense of humanity, and an abiding sympathy for his characters. He also writes with as subtle a touch as you could wish for. Through his eyes we examine a collection of personal turning points, crucial reassessments of lives that have gone wrong, or which might have been different. In the opening story, ‘Big World', the narrator reflects on an adolescent escape from Angelus which didn’t work out, and a future which is both better and worse than might have been hoped for – and which is, either way, ‘unimaginable’. Peter Dyson in ‘Small Mercies’ also returns to the town, only to be confronted by an ex-girlfriend whose life forces him to imagine what might have been. And in ‘Boner McPharlin’s Moll’, Jackie Martin considers the blinkered years where she’d ‘looked on and seen nothing’:

I was no different to my parents. Yet I'd always believed I'd come so far, surpassed so much. At fifteen I would have annihilated myself for love, but over the years something had happened, something I hadn't bothered to notice, as though in all that leaving, in the rush to outgrow the small-town girl I was, I'd left more of myself behind than the journey required.

Winton’s fascination is with the moment of realisation, most frequently a crux arrived at in middle age which forces individuals to look back at their adolescence and those moments or people which they left behind, or screwed up, or wish they'd handled differently. Crucially, in most cases, a potential to make up for things and start to repair the damage follows hard on these biting reassessments.

Susan Tranter

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