Dirt Music (review)

Plenty of writers mistrust the short sentence, except as an occasional breather between long ones. Not Tim Winton. In his early forties, with a career's worth of novels already behind him (Cloudstreet, That Eye, The Sky, the Booker-nominated The Riders), Winton creates rich characters who work as hard as he does, who won't spare time for a lot of windy introspection unless fate backs them into it. Especially in his salty, frequently very funny dialogue, Winton and his people all sound as if they've got nails in their mouths. When the landscape of his beloved Western Australia carries him away, though, Winton turns lyrical with a sensuous, unsyrupy beauty few other writers can touch. His latest novel, Dirt Music, should enhance his small but fervent following in the United States. If it catches on here with anything like the popularity it did in Oz, it could well light up the whole Qantas reservation switchboard.

Dirt Music hitches together several archetypal stories. It's a love triangle that becomes a road novel before evolving into a Robinson Crusoe-style desert island idyll. Weaker characters might not have held together such a jerry-built, stubbornly unmanipulative novel, but with Winton we needn't have worried.

Winton introduces us first to Georgina "Georgie" Jutland, an intelligent, bored, fortyish ex-nurse turned "lobster moll." She's falling out of love with her common-law husband, Jim, a lucky fisherman with a violent streak. Along comes Luther Fox, a lonely seafood poacher with bad luck to rival Jim's good, and the fuse is lit for a confrontation made all the more ominous by Winton's reluctance to play favorites among his characters. Plainly, not everybody's going to walk away happy, and we're welcome to wonder whether some will walk away at all.

Winton is juggling a few themes here. Luck and its changeability—or lack of same—come in for a good long look. Solitude, too, its loneliness and its consolations, finds in Winton an observer of uncommon sensitivity. When Luther takes refuge on a tropical atoll, the narration subtly modulates into the second person as if he's talking to himself for want of company.

Winton's also a dab-hand at bereavement both sudden and lingering, a skill that comes in handy for a novel in which recurrent mayhem freights even the shortest vehicular trip with uneasy suspense. His staccato sentences work heartbreakingly well here, slowing down the violence into haunting flashes and distilling the rhythms of grief-racked speech: "I just. Miss. My mum, Jude said between awful gulping sobs."

It's a potent irony of Dirt Music that most of the middle-aged adults wax nostalgic for their childhoods, while one or two younger characters have traumas that any sane person would look forward to forgetting as soon as possible. At times this grimness, plus perhaps one or two dream sequences too many, threaten to sandbag the story under a burden of portentousness. Late in the novel, Winton's prose flirts a bit with high-minded murk, too, of which the line "He feels himself within himself" supplies a suitably gluey example.

What redeems Dirt Music throughout are Winton's humor, his romantic faith in the power of love to come along and screw up even the most rut-bound lives, his tactile regard for rude, nouny particulars of physical labor and, not least, the majesty of his regard for nature. Just listen to this interlude from Luther's thrillingly described walkabout along the north coast:

He finds that if you sit still long enough the bush or the sea will produce an event. You wait with trancelike patience until manta rays begin to roll in the shallows or baitfish form like stormclouds along the spit. A beetle big as a golfball will fall from the woven pandanus. A turtle ups periscope in the stillness. A sheet of lightning scours the brainpan.

No wonder they call it Oz.