Tim Winton’s latest, hauntingly post–apocalyptic novel Juice is peppered with fragments of recognisable western culture. Snippets from the Bible and poetry leak into the otherwise blunt speech of our anonymous narrator.
Winton’s protagonist tells his story in staccato bursts. Even though this is quite a long novel, and quite an unremittingly bleak one, it never loses that intensity and focus.
Winton has spent seven years writing this novel – which is, above all, a polemical take on a futuristic world after a climate apocalypse has rendered civilisation subordinate to the desperate desire for water and escape from the heat.
After a pulsating start in which our hero drags a child through this barren wilderness while being chased by mysterious forces, we settle into the story of his life. In a bid to combat the hubs of climate criminals who roam the lifeless earth, he joins a paramilitary organisation which is leading operations from Utah to the Australian West Coast. A bowman is the only companion to the jaundiced narrator, and he offers bursts of light to change the perspective.
Throughout the novel, the reader is urged to embrace the sheer alien nature of the world that Winton depicts – the way that he manipulates our view of what has survived the apocalypse, and what has not. That said, within his critical and prophetic vision there are still important remnants of the emotional intensity and characterisation for which Winton has made his name.
Our protagonist’s mother, daughter and wife are central, witty and ultimately destructive characters, who provide something of a core to this novel that we can relate to. It is a profoundly, powerfully disorientating read; our sense of time, space, morality all upended.
