CREDIT: Brian Harris (Alamy)
Freakily, reading Tim Winton’s Dirt Music is like reading about myself. Looking back, it’s not difficult to find a time when I was a little lost, a little trapped, a little aimless and a lot unsure. This is what Winton does so well. He’s the master of the awkward, the displaced and the stuck, so while Dirt Music is an Australian story, it’s a universal one too. If you like your characters neat and clean and sure of themselves, he’s not your guy. The characters in this novel are imperfect beings held in place by their pasts and weighed down by guilt and regret.
White Point, the fictitious fishing town in Dirt Music, is somewhere within a couple of hours drive of Perth, Western Australia, but the story migrates up the coast of our largest state, all the way to the Top End. If you care to, look at a map just to take in the immensity. Even we Australians are gob-smacked. This novel makes me want to take that long journey north and feel the space and meet the inhabitants.
But let’s discuss characters. Georgie, an ex-nurse, sailor and family rebel, has come to full stop in White Point. She’s quit nursing. It’s a job she once loved and one which took her to Dubai, until she ran out of caring. She jumps ship on her return home in Indonesia to escape a disastrous relationship and this is where she meets Jim Buckridge. Jim is the captain of a fishing boat out of White Point and is living high on the proceeds of the rock lobster boom. But he’s grieving the loss of his wife from breast cancer, and carries guilt over his past behaviour. Georgie comes to stay with Jim and his two young sons.
At the story’s outset, its three years later. She’s fallen out of love with Jim, but can’t bring herself to move on. That’s when she has a chance encounter with Luther Fox, a poacher in a fishing village with no tolerance for them. He’d be better off someplace else, but he stays in his empty family home surrounded by tragic memories unable to do the thing he loves most. Play music.
Georgie says Jim and Luther are alike, and they are, even though they would resist the comparison. Both are held by in place by gravitational forces so strong only existential dread can release them . And perhaps it takes Georgie to see this. She has travelled the world, always eager to move on, all the while rejecting the lives of her mother and her sisters and their hollow marriages. It’s ironic that only now she finds herself similarly stuck in White Point, deeply unhappy, and caring for a brooding fisherman and his two sons.
It’s odd, isn’t it? We can outstay an idea and yet be unable to muster the energy to break free. I’ve wondered about this since reading Dirt Music and whether its a kind of self-flagellation. Life can go effortlessly, making sense to us and everyone around us. The wheels are greased, I guess. We slip by unscathed. Then suddenly, or so it seems, we seize. Maybe it’s our grief or our guilt catching us up. Moral downtime.
Catching these glimpses of life in a novel is why I love to read. Some things, perhaps the most important ones, can’t be approached straight on. It’s like looking at the sun. Dirt Music is a reminder that uncertainty and emotional paralysis are part of life and should this be you or me right now, in the past or in some time to come, its okay.
Have I made this novel sound joyless? It’s not. The characters in White Point are pretty interesting, as are the ones you will meet on Luther’s journey north. There’s a dog with a ‘tangle-footed’ run. There’s music too, the kind you feel in the wind and in your bones. Acoustic, dirt music.
If you wish, you can read a review of another of Tim Winton’s novels, The Turning, here.