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December 14, 2003
Review: Punitive, cathartic, redemptive
WHAT’S the big deal about redemption these days? There’s so much literature about confronting your demons and coming to terms with yourself. Whether they come out up front and call it Atonement like Ian McEwan or go around it and call it Dirt Music like Tim Winton; it’s all the same thing. It is as if the characters have packed away their pasts in little sacks and kept them away. But circumstances turn in such a way that they are forced to open their baggage and examine the load they are carrying.
In Dirt Music, if they have to travel to the Australian outback or the boon docks of ocean and rain forest, then so be it. For the reader it’s a treat to experience these places.
Dirt Music has a small main cast of three, which forms the age old triangle of two men wanting the same woman. Georgie Jutland is a fortyish ex-nurse who comes from a dysfunctional family. She is indecisive, drifting and, although well-travelled, has no concept of what direction to take in life. Georgie is bored with her current partner Jim Buckridge who is a widower with two sons. He is also the undisputed king of the fishing community. On the surface he looks like a man to respect but it seems he too has his own past issues to reckon with. The death of his wife has scarred him permanently.
And then there is Lu Fox, the loner ‘shammateur’ (illegal fisherman/poacher), the mysterious man of a woman’s dream. “He was a man trying to live like a man, by force of will. But it was against his nature”.
Georgie is just being carried with the tide. She constantly has issues with her influential but broken family. In a losing relationship with Jim, she spends her nights drinking Vodka and aimlessly surfing the Net. She had left her medical degree to become a nurse in Saudi Arabia. Flashbacks of Mrs Jubail’s battle against cancer gnaw at Georgie’s sense of helplessness. Her own mother has been a shopaholic who uses retail therapy to mask her deepest issues with Georgie’s unfaithful father.
Georgie is a woman who has closed the book on her past because for her it was “just an awkward place to visit.” She believes that “people have a right to leave their past behind.” The problem is “that everybody else remembers”.
Now Lu Fox has a past horrific enough to remember. But he has become master of the art of disappearing without actually leaving. One night, during her aimless wanderings Georgie’s car breaks down and she comes across him and connects to her other half — her desperately lost soul. “He was just another symptom of her weird attraction to suffering.” The problem is that the intensities of feelings are basically in absentia because the actual relationship survives only a few days. Thereafter Lu is hounded out and driven away, his dog killed, his property robbed.
It is with Lu’s departure that we begin our journey through the rugged and inhospitable landscape of Western Australia. Here the pace becomes much slower but it is not the life of idyllic countryside that we encounter but unusual bed fellows; trailer people and truckers, some are uncouth while another is deeply sad and dying. This is an odd motley where life is hard but as with most well developed countries, help is always available in the form of basic amenities and transport. But that is not all. The burning landscape with its ranges and streams, the sea and the islands are protagonists in themselves. They are pulsating and talking like the nature in Yann Martell’s Life of Pi. One has to reckon with them as deeply as one confronts one’s relationships and above all oneself.
The plot is simple at its basic level, but most importantly it is something you immediately identify with. The romance and the adventure make the deeper questions more palatable. Winton switches between first and third person in the way only a master story teller can. Many people would not even realize this is going on. But what remains enduringly true are the deep poetic insights into the human psyche and soul.
This novel leaves you uneasy and more than faintly disturbed. While being an easy read, there is a constant awareness of the characters searing emotional wounds, so deep that it is impossible for them to move — they are disabled; and the landscape complements them perfectly. It is bleak and beautiful, rigid yet awe inspiring in stature. It would be impossible to neglect Winton’s opening quotation by Emily Dickenson. It may be daunting but it is starkly beautiful. But has his novel lived up to its reality?
There is a solitude of space/ A solitude of sea/ A solitude of death, but these/ Society shall be/ Compared with that/ Profounder site/ That polar privacy/ A soul admitted to itself/ Finite infinity.
Dirt Music
By Tim Winton
Picador
ISBN 0330490265
461pp. £15.99
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