Juice

Juice

Author: Tim Winton

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Random House)

Published: October 2024

Four-time Miles Franklin and Booker-shortlisted author Tim Winton is of Australia’s most celebrated writers, renowned for his lyrical prose and deep connection to the Australian landscape. His novels, such as Cloudstreet, Shallows, The Riders, and Breath, often explore themes of family, identity, spirituality, and environmental conservation. Winton frequently addresses the human relationship with nature, the challenges of adolescence, and the complexities of personal and social responsibility.

His short story collection The Turning and memoir Island Home further reflect his focus on transformation, interconnectedness, and environmental advocacy, cementing his reputation as a storyteller deeply engaged with both the natural world and the human condition.

Winton’s novel Juice, his latest and 30th book, is widely seen as a radical departure, characterised variously as “cli-fi” (climate fiction), spec-fic (speculative fiction), post-apocalyptic road trip and dystopian thriller. It is in fact all of these and none of them, while being not so much as a departure from his previous work in substance and form but rather a summation of his central concerns (the environment, human relationships) and storytelling skills – not to mention the near-apotheosis of his lean, lyrical prose style. As the captor of Juice’s nameless narrator says: ‘Ah. A bard and a scholar.’

To briefly survey the vast, scorched Western Australian landscape of this 513-page tome, it’s many years in the future and an older man and a young girl pull into a forsaken mine site, seeking refuge and supplies. They are quickly captured by the site’s solitary resident, and thus unfolds a Scheherazade-like epic as the man relates his past – his family, his former profession, his fate until this point – in order to convince his captor audience that he is no threat.

Along the way, we learn of the earth’s fate and many of its former inhabitants, including the narrator’s own family, and the continuing conflict between those who were responsible for laying waste to the planet propelled by greed and arrogance, and those who have set themselves up as judges and executioners.

A slow burner at first, Juice soon accelerates into a literary page turner as revelation after revelation tumbles out of the cracks between action set-pieces, tense dialogic stand-offs and gripping emotional climaxes leave the reader with barely enough energy to take in the stark yet paradoxically hopeful message of this book: there is still time to save the planet, but time is running out to avoid the nightmarish scenario into which you’ve just been plunged.

 

Reviewed by Will Yeoman