Tim Winton, Eyrie (2013) & Cloudstreet (1991)
I have many reasons to be grateful for Cloudstreet by Tim Winton (born 1960). It was the first book I ever reviewed for publication. Since then, it has been followed by more than one thousand other books and, looking back on that review I wrote for Eureka Street almost thirty years ago, it strikes me now as high-falutin’ twaddle.
Cloudstreet created a part-time job for which I am extremely thankful. Tim Winton himself once told me that he has never read a book without learning at least something and I would heartily agree with that, even if my learning has sometimes been modest. Reviewing has brought me into contact with writing I would never otherwise have experienced. It is where I have done some of my best listening.
Another reason for my gratitude concerns a woman called Jenny Scott who, when young, left Australia and went to live in England for a list of reasons that did not include escaping me, as we had not yet met. She found kindred spirits in an offbeat Christian community in North London, part of whose vision was expressed in an annual arts festival called Greenbelt, held over the bank-holiday weekend in what the English refer to as summer. After That Eye, the Sky (1986) was published, Tim Winton made an appearance at Greenbelt and the community was struck by the depth of this affable, witty and intelligent young Australian with long hair and a poor wardrobe. The first meeting ‘was a moment of instant mutual species recognition’, says Tim. ‘One sniff and we knew—evangelical leftovers!’ He made friends: one member of the community, Malcolm Doney, makes a cameo in The Riders (1994).
When Jenny Scott arrived, the community urged her to read Cloudstreet, Winton’s then most recent book. The novel reawakened for her a love of reading that she had lost sight of as life threw any number of unreadable challenges in her direction. She inched through the book standing in crowded trains on the tube during a dark winter, pausing when the light wasn’t good enough to see the words on the page.
Cloudstreet is joyous. It is full of both sunshine and shadow, one of the reasons it has a place among the most popular novels ever written by an Australian. The book made Jenny Scott think more kindly of a country from which she had fled. In some ways, it was the beginning of her journey home. Without that journey, we would never have met. Our children should be grateful to Cloudstreet, too.
Jenny’s experience encapsulates some of the magic of Cloudstreet. It is a book about home written by someone who was far from home.
Tim Winton was still a teenager when he made the most profound commitments of his life. One of them was to become a writer. Another was to feed his spirit on the landscape of his native Western Australia. These two commitments have been closely interwoven. Not long after Cloudstreet appeared, I was able to visit him in the basic fibro shack he and Denise, his wife, owned in a coastal town, a place Winton once described as ‘plug ugly’. It looked like a puff of wind might blow it over. The whole house didn’t seem to weigh as much as the ageing four-wheel-drive that stood outside. The garage had been converted into a workspace that Tim shared with a collection of well-used fishing equipment.
To an outsider, it might have looked as if Winton was on permanent holiday. This would be to miss the hard work and discipline he has brought to his craft, and the intent with which he honours the life of the mind. We became friendly over a shared interest in theology, especially the monk Thomas Merton (see Chapter 16). We also both enjoy novelists of the American South, such as Flannery O’Connor (see Chapter 15), Walker Percy and Frederick Buechner.
We went out on his small boat, a tinny, and Tim threw himself into the water while I held on to the side, hoping not to fall out. He later suggested that my life would be happier if it was more physical. He was right. I was a priest at that stage, which was no excuse for being sedentary.
Tim’s creativity is tied to the physical world and he loves the point at which the ocean meets the land. That meeting has fed him since his family moved to Albany, on the south coast, when he was twelve. He respects the natural world: I have been with him in a restaurant where he was uncomfortable because there was a fish on the menu whose stocks had been depleted by over-fishing. The ocean is ubiquitous in his imagination. He has campaigned on behalf of saving Ningaloo Reef. When our first child, Benedict, was born Tim sent us a card to celebrate ‘a great catch on light tackle’, a compliment Jenny enjoyed. In an essay called ‘The Wait and the Flow’ in the collection The Boy Behind the Curtain (2016), Winton has compared the life of a writer to that of a surfer:
I come to the desk every day and mostly I wait. I sit for hours, bobbing in a sea of memories, impressions and historical events. The surfer waits for swells, and what are they but the radiating energy of events across the horizon, the leftovers of tempests and turmoils already in the past? The surfer waits for something to turn up from the unseen distance and if he’s vigilant and patient it’ll come to him. He has to be there to meet it. And when it comes he has to be alert and fit and committed enough to turn and ride that precious energy to the beach. When you manage to do this you live for a short while in the eternal present tense. And the feeling is divine.
That’s how I experience writing, which is its own compulsion. I show up. I wait. When some surge of energy finally arrives, I do what I can to match its speed.
Cloudstreet was mostly written at a time in the late 1980s when Tim and his young family were overseas and he was missing the places that provided his orientation in the world. An arts grant had enabled them to live for a while in Ireland, Greece and Paris. This is where he worked on Cloudstreet, writing the novel longhand, a practice he has continued, often sitting in cafés to find space to work, even when that meant coping with the cold in Paris and the heat in Greece. Writing longhand has its drawbacks. When Winton got off the bus at Rome airport to finally return to Australia, he had left the one copy of the eight-hundred-page manuscript behind. He didn’t expect to see it again and was returning to Australia with nothing to show for all that work. Luckily, a stranger had found it on the floor of the bus and gone looking for the author in the airport. The kindness of strangers is one of the themes to which Winton’s work often returns.
Cloudstreet is nostalgic in the best sense: it longs for both a time and place that the author is missing. It belongs with James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964) as a meticulous and detailed recreation from memory of a place from which the writer is absent, even in exile. This, I am sure, is what engaged Jenny Scott at a deep level as she discovered the book on the London underground. It helped to send her in search of home.
Cloudstreet is based around the Swan River and is a celebration of the Perth of the generation of Winton’s grandparents, and, indeed, some of the most eccentric happenings in the book are close to fact. It is richly comic. Even its language hankers for things past in delightful ways. There are expressions such as doogs, staggerjuice, zacs, deaner, drongo, hittin the sauce, having the painters in, a bit of the foldin, pushin yer luck, fair whack, donkey yacker, fourbetwo, fair dinkum and dills.
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Tim Winton has never tried to write Cloudstreet again, although he must have experienced pressure to keep the laughs coming. The book steadily consolidated its place in Australian culture and one of his young relatives ended up withdrawing from a course in order to avoid studying Cloudstreet. Tim says: ‘I think the book (and probably its author) cast too big a shadow at the time.’
Tim found other fish to fry and his career, now in its fourth decade, has always been open to new challenges. Those challenges, like Cloudstreet, have often come from concern about the vacant moral centre of the community he is part of. In 2013 Eyrie was something to celebrate, not least because it was the work of a writer who had continued to grow and whose craft had only sharpened.
Eyrie is as different from Cloudstreet as then is from now. Eyrie is a work of toughened wisdom. Many of the sentences in it are as sharp as glass.
Tom Keely, the central figure, has reached the point that Dante described, in Clive James’s vernacular translation of The Divine Comedy, as ‘the midpoint of the path through life’. He owns a small flat on the tenth floor of The Mirador, a charmless and barely functional architectural eyesore perched on the edge of the continent in Fremantle, a part of Perth that prides itself on not being part of Perth. Keely is forty-nine. Two years ago, his marriage to Harriet fell apart. One year ago, he suddenly lost the prominent job he had as a spokesperson for an environmental agency.
For fifteen years, Keely had worked passionately for a cause in which he believed until a sudden ‘brain snap’, lasting about five or six minutes but which we never see fully dramatised, makes him a pariah. So it is that in the middle of his life he is left with a modest pension (which arrives on a day Winton describes as ‘the fortnightly full moon’) and a crumbling sense of self. Keely is a character sharply at odds with the myth of male ego which governs a good part of Australian culture. He is a mess made as much by the rapaciousness of his world as by his own hungers.
This is Winton’s most pointedly political novel and it arrived during Western Australia’s minerals boom, the ‘endless reserves of mining loot’. His city is ‘a philistine giant ready to pass off its good fortune as virtue’. Winton’s excoriation touches everything from supermarkets to café society. The hungry are said to ‘eat like pokie machines’.
Eyrie makes reference to figures as diverse and passionate in their views as Calvin, Bonhoeffer, Stanley Spencer and Billy Graham. Its lexicon includes expressions such as shriven, redeemed, salvation, mercy, prayer, deliverance, fierce saviour, Great Defender and so on. Keely’s father, Neville, was a born-again minister intolerant of social niceties. He was one of God’s strongmen, who stood up to a domestic abuser in their neighbourhood. Keely is his heir, at least in disposition, but he now has a hole in him where the Great Defender used to be: ‘sometimes it was the size of him entire.’
None of this is to imply that Eyrie is a religious tract. But it is enthralling to see a writer blunting the sharp edge of contemporary culture with such a hard stone as intelligent theology, which is far from the self-righteous mush that generally gets passed off as the religious contribution to public debate. In some respects this is a jeremiad, albeit lightened by Winton’s mischievous wit and his uncanny ear for dialogue.
Eyrie tackles myths of prosperity and success in a way that is not always comfortable but that stirs thought. It is rich in compassion and affectionate towards the unlovely. It has a strong belief that no journey ends at the halfway mark. It shares that belief with Cloudstreet just as much as both books share the Swan River.
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When Dirt Music was published, in 2002, the cover of the book was reproduced on a full front page of the arts section of the West Australian. It was a major event, with an accompanying CD and much publicity, an aspect of his career Tim does not relish. By now Tim had an enviable rapport with a wide readership; he was as much a celebrity as a writer ever gets to be in Australia. I happened to be in Fremantle and we went out for a coffee. Tim asked if he could sit with his back to the café but people kept coming up to say hello.
This was a challenging time in my own life and Tim immediately disengaged from the literary world to listen to my problems.
‘Just go to the light,’ he said.
I asked what he meant by that.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said. To use one of his own literary expressions, he laughed like a drain. ‘I’m really not sure. That’s why I’m writing all these books. I’m trying to find out.’