I heard about this book from Danya, who quoted the first sentences, which made me grin. Here’s how the book starts:
Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water’s edge. (p 1)
I love that, the “dreamy briny sunshine” and the city “all blocks and points of mirror light,” the way it makes you see the sun on windows, the sun on the corners of buildings, the sun on water, the glint of it.
Tim Winton’s writing, throughout, is satisfying. I like the lyrical bits and the everyday bits: the way that, at one point, Sam Pickles’s daily walk is described as “the thing he did, the shape of his day” (p 75), or the way that VJ Day is described, all the bells in town ringing at once, or the way that, on a hot summer day, “birds cut singing down to a few necessary phrases” (p 125). Most of all I like the descriptions of the water, the waterfront: the “silver-skinned river” (p 2), the “fishing boats […] coming in along the breakwater for the night, their diesels throbbing like blood” (p 7), “the ocean, flat as sheetmetal” (p 9). I like the green waves at the wharf at Fremantle, how “Fish lies face down, cooing, peering through the plank cracks at the way the green mass rises to him and stops at the final moment” (p 108).
Plot-wise, this book’s about two families, the Pickleses and the Lambs, and it’s set in Western Australia, starting during World War II. We have Sam Pickles, whose father was a water diviner and a gambler; Sam himself has a “nose for chance,” “an excitement in random shifts, the sudden leaping out of the unforeseen” (p 12). Except that chance, that luck, isn’t always good. After Sam loses four fingers in a work accident, and after his brother dies, he and his family move from Geraldton to Perth and into a rambling old house Sam’s brother left him. The Lambs, meanwhile, are down on their luck as well; one of their six kids (nine-year-old Samson – called Fish) nearly drowns, and ends up brain-damaged as a result, and the Lambs end up renting half the house from Sam. The two families live together awkwardly at first, each in their own half of the house, but daily life carries on: the Lambs open a store in their half; the Pickles live off the rent money ’til Sam gets a job working at the mint; the kids go to school, except for Fish, who doesn’t. Sam gambles; Sam wins; Sam loses; Sam’s wife leaves; Sam’s wife comes back. Next door, Fish is funny and odd; odd things happen to or around him; he doesn’t recognize his mother; his mother moves into a tent in the backyard. Odd things happen to Fish’s brother, Quick, as well, especially once Quick leaves home. Odd things, holy things, Biblically-overtoned-things, miracles, but strange ones.
This book’s interesting because for much of the time it’s a straight family story, told in short chapter-lets within longer sections, days and months progressing (mostly) linearly, but it’s also got magic and mystery and literary leanings, and that combination made it feel somehow different from books I usually read, though I couldn’t articulate why. In any case, I enjoyed it!
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