ISBN: 0743276930
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 5
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Summary: Not always a fan but this book may be one of the finest collections
Sometimes Mr Winton seems to be straining to be profound riddling his books with impressive literary devices - or maybe I'm too dumb to recognise great art. But with THE TURNING he seems completely at ease and as a consequence the stories ring with a truth - an emotional and spiritual truth firmly set in a believable landscape. The title story about Raelene's physical and spiritual journey, is in the patois of we Australians - a ripper! Mr Winton's great contribution to world literature may indeed be the way in which he is liberating the Australian language and bringing the voice and stories of our caravan dwellers, fishermen, and other inhabitants of small town Australia - working and otherwise - to the fore.
The Lockie Leonard trilogy and THE TURNING I expect have joined or will be joining our collective memories much as Blinky Bill, Ginger Meggs and Voss already have.
Summary: Antics in Angelus
There's a special appeal to the "linked" short story collection. Although the same names and places appear, each is new with the next story. The desperate men, the battered wives, the confused and bewildered children. They interact in their own ways, coming together and breaking apart over the years. In the hands of a master storyteller like Winton, each tale is a spark of reality. Every individual comes almost startlingly alive in but a few pages. As the sequence unfolds through the view of the protagonist, you gain fresh insights on circumstances. Absolute values have no place here, a lesson most of us would do well to remember.
The tales are set in a coastal town in Western Australia. Angelus is a fishing community - often under stress from unemployment, it is a contained locale. Children grow up as neighbours, move through school together, and interact in almost wildly varying ways as they mature. There are mysteries - why was a boy left broken and battered on a beach? Who was the girl found dead in a school loo and how did she die? Who escaped the almost desolate town and how bound do they remain to it in later years? These are common situations and questions in a small town, and the economic pressures add intensity to the expected conditions we all endured in adolescence. It is a credit to Winton's outstanding prose skills that beauty emerges within this forlorn community. A coastal location always provides a sense of expanded view lacking in inland towns. Yet here, as almost everywhere in Australia, the desert looms as an ever-present menace, poorly understood and a block to escape even mountains fail to match.
Vic Lang, the character around whom these stories weave, emerges first as a young child at a beach party. His life is complex. While in school, a girl with a facial birthmark fascinates him, but that's not the girl he marries. His attachments are intense and sometimes offbeat. He takes up with "Boner" McPharlin [the term comes from his job in an abattoir], the Huckleberry Finn of his time and place. Totally without ambition, Boner's presence gives Vic a basis for comparison with his own life. It's a shaky foundation to launch into adulthood. Vic symbolises the small-town outlook with his sense of being under constant scrutiny. In "The Long, Clear View", Vic reflects on his life and how the town imposed so much of itself on his later life.
North American readers often balk at the "culture shock" of Australian conditions and language. Winton's deft touch softens the shock to what might be deemed a "culture tickle". His character portrayals and the manner in which he deals with the passage of time among what become familiar people, guide the reader effortlessly through some unfamiliar terms and conditions. What does "shoot through" mean? It has nothing to do with weapons. It means "escape" or "desertion" depending on the protagonist's viewpoint. A "jacaranda" turns out to be a tree, ugly when not blooming, but a stunning array of colour in the proper season. If a blossom falls on while walking underneath, it is said to be a sign of good luck. Does that happen in Angelus?
Winton's realistic view of people and events is at odds with much of today's literature. His voice, while grim and sometimes even bleak, doesn't overwhelm the reader with despair. His people aren't crushed by events, they remain battlers even in the most seemingly desperate circumstances. You must, however, traverse the entire sequence to understand how they accomplish that feat. While each story stands entirely on its own, like a brick-built building, they must all be taken together to perceive the entire stunning edifice. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
Summary: A "Full-On" Writer
In Tim Winton's latest gift to the reading public-- and what a gift it is-- he includes 17 stories, at least half of which are printed here for the first time. There are similarities in many of them. They are often set in the same place, and some of the characters reappear in different stories. They are often poor, eking out a living from fishing. They seldom leave the little towns they grew up in-- unless they are a father-- and sometimes a mother-- who simply one day walks out, never to return. They are often driven to drink and sometimes fundamentalist religion and may be overwhelmed by what Rick Bragg would call the train wreck in their lives. Some suffer from "closed-down resignation." One mother says that "they all leave you in the end." Their fragile, damaged lives, however, are often tempered by love. One character ("Commission") who has not seen his run-away father in 27 years and has every reason to feel differently, when he sees him again is "sick with love. . . at the very sight of him." Almost to a person, these characters work with the hand they have been dealt, often with little complaining.
Fictional characters usually grab us in one of two ways, assuming of course that they are real life flesh and blood to begin with, as Winton's always are. They are either exotic and not like anyone we have ever known-- anyone Tolstoy wrote about, for example, or, like Winton's, they remind us of many people we either now know or have known. Even though these characters inhabit Australia, about as far from the Southern United States as one can go, I recognized many of them. They could have stepped out of the novels of many Southern writers. Harry Crews, for example, in his memoirs published several years ago, remarked that it was not unusual for people he knew as a child growing up in South Georgia to have a missing finger. My paternal grandfather as a young man lost a finger from a horse bite. Much is made in one of Winton's stories of a young woman's missing finger ("Abbreviation"). Another girl has a huge facial birthmark. Others are imperfect in other ways.
While all theses stories are exceptional, the best story by far-- and one of the best I have read in a very long time-- is "Small Mercies." This scalding story is so powerful and the characters so haunting that you will not be able to read another one right away. How Mr. Winton can pack so much sorrow, raw pain and passion into about 30 pages is beyond me, but he does it. The first line, "Peter Dyson came home one day to find his wife dead in the garage" sets the tone for this intense story; and the writer does not let up. Dyson, unlike many of these characters who cannot wait to get out of the restrictive towns they grew up in, takes his six-year-old son Ricky and goes back to the house where he was raised in an attempt to put the pieces of his shattered life back together. He runs into Marjorie and Don Keenan, whom he describes as "full-on people," and ultimately their daughter Faye with whom he had-- at least according to him-- a very unhealthy sexual relationship throughout high school. Faye is also recently back in town, just free from drugs but teetering on a relapse. She would like to see her daughter more (who now lives with the grandparents) and would like to become friends again with Peter and rekindle whatever they had going in the past. She is both sad and manipulative-- and as human as your Aunt Edith. It does not seem fair to the rest of us mortals that anyone could write a short story this fine. But as President Jimmy Carter said-- and these characters to a person would agree-- life is not fair.
For the strong-hearted, these stories are not to be missed.
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