This document is an extract from The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred, published by Sydney University Press. ISBN: 9781743325032 (paperback) 9781743325049 (ebook: epub) 9781743325063 (ebook: PDF) All requests for reproduction or communication should be made to Sydney University Press at the address below: Sydney University Press Fisher Library F03 University of Sydney NSW 2006 AUSTRALIA [email protected] sydney.edu.au/sup Parts of this work are available on the University of Sydney eScholarship Repository at hdl.handle.net/2123/15592. Please cite the full work as: McCredden, Lyn (2016). The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred. Sydney: Sydney University Press. The book may be purchased from Sydney University Press at the following link: http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/sup/fictionoftimwinton. The Fiction of Tim Winton SYDNEY STUDIES IN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE Robert Dixon, Series Editor Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time Robert Dixon Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead Nicholas Birns Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays Ed. Brigitta Olubas The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred Lyn McCredden Coming in 2017 – Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formation and the Colonial Economy Ken Gelder and Rachel Weaver The Fiction of Tim Winton Earthed and Sacred Lyn McCredden First published by Sydney University Press © Lyn McCredden 2016 © Sydney University Press 2016 Reproduction and Communication for other purposes Except as permitted under the Act, no part of this edition may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or communicated in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All requests for reproduction or communication should be made to Sydney University Press at the address below: Sydney University Press Fisher Library F03 University of Sydney NSW 2006 AUSTRALIA [email protected] sydney.edu.au/sup National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Creator: McCredden, Lyn, 1953– author. Title: The fiction of Tim Winton : earthed and sacred / Lyn McCredden. ISBN: 9781743325032 (paperback) 9781743325049 (ebook: epub) 9781743325056 (ebook: mobi) 9781743325063 (ebook: PDF) Series: Sydney studies in Australian literature. Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Subjects: Winton, Tim, 1960—Criticism and interpretation. Cover image: Tim Winton in Denmark, south-west WA. Photograph by Erin Jonasson, courtesy Fairfax Media. Cover design by Miguel Yamin Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction: A Writing Life 1 1 Words and Worlds 19 2 “To Solicit a Becoming”: Masculine and Feminine in the Fiction of Winton 35 3 Falling 49 4 Narrative Redemptions 67 5 “Liquid Elites and Bonded Shame”: Winton and Class Identity 81 6 High and Popular: Straddling the Fiction Market 97 7 Becoming, Belonging 107 8 Winton’s Narratives: Market, Reading, Impact 123 Afterword 143 Works Cited 145 Index 151 vii Acknowledgements Nothing is sweeter in this world than the unconditional and ongoing love of a good person – a person able to ride the waves of change with panache, able to remember deeply. Such love is transforming. Thank you to those good people who have loved me, nourished me, and allowed me to love in return. Now that is sacred. Thank you to the Australian Research Council who provided me with funds and therefore time to write this work. Many thanks to my tireless Research Assistant, Chloe Chandler. ix Introduction: A Writing Life Literary critics across the last fifty years have sonorously declared the death of the author. This idea – playful, metaphoric or literal – is hard to credit, however, if you are a reader who is made constantly, visually aware of a robust, pony-tailed figure, a surfie, fisherman and ordinary bloke who also happens to be multi-award-winning author Tim Winton. Those portraits of Winton as Aussie Puck by the beach, looking anything but a member of the literati, are widely recognisable. They are portraits of one of Australia’s favourite writers, a local hero in his native Fremantle, Western Australia. For many readers this author is, first of all, Cloudstreet (1991), and very much alive. Tim Winton does not simply equate to this over-familiar image, of course. Nor is he universally loved. Rather, he is a shape-shifter: a working-class child who became a class traveller with an adult vocation. Winton is not from the “civilised centres” over east, but from the western fringes of the continent. He is one of Australia’s most popular writers, and also one of its finest literary authors; a children’s writer and a complex wordsmith, a lyrical poet in prose with an ear for quotidian, vernacular speech. He chooses to live away from urban centres, in places where most of his readers do not live, and he maintains a firm and intriguing distance between author and critic. He is a self-identifying Christian in a largely secular nation; an outspoken and idealistic environmentalist with a prophetic streak of pessimism informing his fiction. Tim Winton: well-documented family man and somewhat of a loner; a masculine figure who creates complex, wounded characters, both male and female; an earthy regionalist who also offers glimpses of the sacred to readers in Australia, and globally. Winton’s fiction is both loved and derided; his religious and political views a little embarrassing or annoying, for some. For example, when Winton’s novel Breath (2008) won the top Australian literary prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, a thread posted to the blog Still Life with Cat claimed: What with first the longlist and then the shortlist, I’m not really all that surprised that the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award has been won by what was by far the safer choice of the two front runners, a novel in which a bitter, twisted woman called Eva (geddit? Small sections of this chapter have been adapted from Lyn McCredden, “Tim Winton’s Poetics of Resurrection”, Literature and Theology 29, no. 3 (2015). 1 The Fiction of Tim Winton geddit?) corrupts the young hero, takes away his innocence and warps his psyche for life with her nasty dangerous bent sick non-missionary sexing-on ways. She robs our hero of Paradise, that’s what she does; she pushes him into his fall from grace. Because, as we all know, that’s what women do. The Bible tells us so . .1 A different way to read these characters in Breath is to see all the characters – Eva, along with Sando and the narrator, Pikelet/Bruce – as wounded, falling, and in need of compassion. Eva, injured and unable to pursue her high level of extreme sport; Eva, lonely and often abandoned by Sando; Eva, dying years later in an autoerotic act; Eva, full of longing and loss. Surely it is simplistic merely to see the depiction of this character as “bitter, twisted” and corrupting. The world of Breath is not black and white. It is not about heroes, villains, paradise and evil, at least not in the way that this blog’s fundamentalist, moralising rendition of good men and ruinous women represents it. The novel is about an earthly, earthy, breathing, broken world in which all humans yearn and strive and fall. There is melancholy, falling short, pain and loss; but there is also great beauty, wonder and grace intertwined in this fractured world. As the older narrator remembers his young self becoming a man, we read a page which is delicate and nuanced in the way it explores relationships between boy and man, man and woman: I basked in Sando’s attention and treasured these brief moments of esteem . We were in the kitchen one day, as Sando ground the spices for his special fish curry, when I saw a photo that I’d never noticed before . The image was a figure in a red snowsuit, a skier more or less upside down against the whiteness of the mountain . Hey, I said. What’s this? Sando paused a moment with the mortar and pestle. The smells of coriander and cumin and turmeric were not the sort of thing that ever came from my mother’s kitchen . That, Pikelet, is my wife. You’re shitting me . Mate, she’s pretty well known. It’s freestyle. It’s a whole other scene. They’re the bad boys and girls of skiing. That’s Utah in ’71. She’s there now. Skiing? Jesus, no – not with that knee. Nah, they’re trying another operation . There’s no snow here, I murmured. How can she stand it? Sando rammed the pestle against the grist of spices. I rested my chin on the benchtop and I could feel the force of his arms pulsing in the wood. I think she prefers it here. I mean, if you couldn’t surf anymore, would you want to live by the sea? The ocean’s beautiful. That’d be enough for me . It seems odd to have remembered it but in later life I had cause to recall the moment. I was in my thirties before I learnt that I too would prefer not to see what I could no longer have.2 1 Kerryn Goldsworthy, “Biblical World View Legitimised: Australian Feminist Icon Turns in Grave”, Still Life with Cat Blog, 18 June 2009. tinyurl.com/Goldsworthy2009. 2 Introduction: A Writing Life In this moving tableau – representation of an alternative family, a hero-worshipping boy and a fallible hero – Eva is the absent, desired, wounded female. She is also deeply present to the man and the boy, a (literally) breathtaking heroine caught in a moment of great beauty, skill and daring in the photograph that Pikelet puzzles over. And for the boy a deep learning is taking place. He is learning firstly about coriander and cumin and turmeric, and about Sando’s special fish curry; about the thrilling risks humans can take; about affection; and about place and time, two earthly mediums in which the child will have to learn about loving, and beauty, and loss.