By Bron Sibree for The Sunday Times
Eyrie
Tim Winton (Picador)
**** (Four stars)
It’s a fact not lost on Tim Winton, one of Australia’s most esteemed authors, that interest in his fiction has been building in South Africa for some years. He marvels at his ever-burgeoning international readership and takes particular delight in the letters he receives from South Africa. “It interests me, that in both South Africa and Australia, our major cities are beleaguered by what some would see as an austere environment, but also beleaguered by the past. In Australia, we had our reformation in the ’70s, and are now living though a determined counter-reformation politically and culturally, and it’s interesting to see that playing out in a different way in South Africa. You do feel in both cultures a sense of curdling of hopes and expectations. Lots of people with goodwill, lots of people of good heart having their hopes dashed.”
Indeed, Winton so masterfully inhabits the character of a man of goodwill whose hopes have curdled in his latest and ninth novel, Eyrie, that the book has been hailed from London to Los Angeles, from Texas to Toronto, for the way it speaks to the tide of inequality currently gripping the developed world. Set in the port city of Fremantle in Western Australia, where Winton lives, it views the resource-rich state of Western Australia and its determined rush toward wealth at all costs through the dyspeptic eyes of one Tom Keely, a middle-aged, unemployed, publicly-disgraced environmental activist. Once something of a celebrity, Keely is now divorced, disillusioned and holed up in the eyrie of the novel’s title, a seedy top-floor apartment in a grim high-rise apartment block for the down-at-heel. He’s fallen so low he’s beyond caring – until, after a chance encounter with his neighbours, a woman from his past and her introverted young son, something shifts within him.
What follows is one of Winton’s most poetic, politically-charged and page-turning novels to date. All the familiar themes of his entire oeuvre—more than 25 works, be they non-fiction, fiction, plays or story collections—are reprised here: the nature of redemption, the quality of mercy, the hazards and joys of family, the preoccupation with landscape, and deep environmental concerns. Anchored in the early days of the global financial crisis and laced with a wry, dark humour, Eyrie speaks so potently to the prevailing zeitgeist that certain passages of its spectacular opening chapter, which sees Keely nursing a hangover, peering over the skyline and reflecting on the “booming state of Western Australia,” have become inscribed into Australia’s national consciousness: the country is “… China’s swaggering enabler… Leviathan with an irritable bowel.”
Some reviewers have called Keely a more haunted version of the 53-year-old author, but Winton is quick to correct this. “Tom Keely is not me, and his views aren’t mine, but there’s a bit of overlap, that’s for sure. It was interesting and a bit painful to inhabit someone who’s just so disenchanted. He embodies those for whom all hopes and dreams are shrivelling and, in retrospect, some of the responses to the book in Australia were about that fact that it spoke in some way for those who, rightly or wrongly, feel that there’s not as many avenues for progressive thinking as there once were.”
In many ways Eyrie asks how we might respond to those who fall outside the circle of family, or tribe, or to those who fall through the cracks opened by a resource-based economy. “Like South Africa, our economy provides a certain limited economic engine, but the benefits aren’t spread around. It’s an economy of winners and losers,” says Winton. “I think it’s a curious development that in the last decade or two we went from talking about and imagining ourselves as a culture to slipping, either by default or political design in the wake of the Reagan/Thatcher era, into thinking of ourselves primarily as an economy. And that’s blunted our imaginations and our sense not just of ourselves but our ability to imagine the plight of others.”
Imagination is a recurring theme in conversation with Winton, who sees it as being that “which unites us as people.” Of his his preternatural ability to convey landcape’s bounty, power and beauty, he says “I was unthinkingly engaged and enchanted and intrigued by the natural world long before I had a language for it. Obviously my obsessions are evident from twenty- something books, but nature is always leaning in, even in a very urban setting like the port city in Eyrie. And I think that’s the Australian experience, whether people realise it or not. Regardless of how urban we are, we’re surround by landscape in a way that perhaps only Africans would understand, where there are vast spaces and great engines of ecology all around us.”
For Winton, the particularity of place “imprints itself on you whether you realise it or not. You get tattooed by it. Sometimes you don’t feel or see the marks until later. Writing a novel for me is like sitting myself down in front of a salt pan and staring long enough until a figure emerges from the other side, rather like something out of a bad western. You just attend to a place and the place determines the logic of those characters.”
Having attended to a very specific place for more than three decades, Winton still finds it “just remarkable” that his books, now translated into 28 languages, are so widely read. “You just think, How can this be? Yet on another level, why shouldn’t somebody from the West Coast of Australia be read in Paris, or London or Johannesburg? I read Daman Galgut and I read Bernard MacLaverty and writers from everywhere. So I think we all underestimate the sort of liquid capacity of literature, or of art in general, to find its way to strangers. I think it’s one of the great miracles of culture that we paint pictures, tell stories, write poems and set them to the winds and they land in places that we’ve never been.”
Follow Bron on Twitter @BronSibree
Book details
- Eyrie by Tim Winton
EAN: 9781447253488
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Image courtesy of Leon Bird