What takes us back to another time? I’m not talking about a memory, something viewed from afar. I’m talking about us slotting back into the skin of our younger selves, looking through those younger eyes and taking it all in with our younger minds. It’s so rare, I think, this kind of transportation, but when it does happen its powerful. It lingers for days.
This is how I felt after reading Tim Winton’s, The Turning. My own childhood, my adolescence came back to me. I know it is partly because he is Australian and a coastal dweller and that he is just a tad older than me, but also I know it’s because he is so very good at what he does. He has managed to capture a generation of Australians.
What makes this such a special book is that it’s a collection of short stories, but it’s also a novel. The link between the stories is the one which is firmly rooted in place, a small seaside town on the West Australian coast called Angelus. It’s also embedded in characters, like Bob and Vic Lang and Boner McPharlin, who are present in multiple stories in multiple timeframes. Each story is complete in itself, and there are some great ones. I loved the title story, The Turning, and Cockleshell and Small Mercies. Sand is a brutal story, but it’s a familiar brutality, an almost casual one. It’s something we witness in families and the effects are long-lasting.
In fact, there’s nothing in these stories, which hasn’t happened before to many of us, so it’s not surprise that drew me in. It was the clarity. Winton’s ability to draw his characters so well, that I knew them. He has a very good eye and an even better ear. He said in a recent and rare tour for another novel of his, The Shepard’s Hut, “I wrote the book the same way I write all the books: just for play, to find out, to make a story and as an excuse to write about landscapes that I love and the people who come out of them.” When he writes of the ocean, you can see it, almost hear it. When he writes his characters, it is the same.
As an Australian reading contemporary writers, I can often feel like a voyeur, but with Winton there is no veil between reader and writer. It’s like he speaks directly to you. His sense of place anchors you and there is a thoughtfulness in the narrative. He is kind to his characters, no matter how unkind they can be.
But no matter how good the stories, this would not be a novel without an overarching theme, and The Turning has one. It’s about how much our childhoods and hometowns make us who we are. It’s about regret, a wistful kind of sorrow that comes with looking back at our child selves and understanding now what we couldn’t then. In short, it’s my kind of book and Winton is my kind of writer.