In tim winton's vogel Awardwinning novel An Open Swimmer, university dropout Jerra Nilsam takes his Volkswagen up the West Australian coast, trawling the ocean for the mythical fish with a pearl in its head. Twenty years later, Jerra bobs up in Winton's latest book, Dirt Music. Now a songwriter in the fishing town of White Point, he's married the local social worker and part-time masseuse. "Fancies himself as a bit of a wine buff these days," she reports. "That's success for you."
Jerra mightn't have found his pearl-"the aggregated life, the distilled knowledge of lifetimes, of ancestors, of travel, of instinct, of things unseen and unknown" -but his author has. A whole string of them. Winton's novels can seem painfully gritty (a family recovers from a car accident, a young father is deserted by his wife, two families struggle after World War II) but they produce moments of shining grace. Towards the end of Dirt Music, Winton's heroine Georgie Jutland, who feels the barren emptiness of middle age stretch before her, reels in a huge, red-eyed barramundi, "hanging there bright as a thought."
More than any other writer of his generation, Winton, 40, has carried the promise of hooking the Big One, the great Australian novel. The build-up began with 1991's Cloudstreet, which explored with tenderness and humor "this great continent of a house," where the Pickle and Lamb families reside in the decades after the war. It continued with 1994's Booker Prize nominated The Riders, which, through the story of a husband grappling with betrayal in Europe, fired an arrow with devastating aim at the heart of Australian manhood. Both novels ached for a sense of family and place lost forever, delivering pearls of wisdom from the depths of spiritual struggle.
With Dirt Music (Picador; 465 pages), Winton clearly has his sights on the Big One. His narrative ranges continent-wide, from the well-to-do riverside suburbs of Perth to the mangrove swamps of the north, and his theme is just as expansive: in a nation built so surely on the notion of the Lucky Country, what happens when luck runs out? With Georgie Jutland and Luther (Lu) Fox, Winton has never delivered characters more in need of saving.
She's the rebellious scion of a wealthy Perth family who, at 40, finds herself washed up in redneck White Point, dulling the pain of a loveless life with the town's lobster millionaire through vodka and the Internet. He's White Point's black sheep, who seeks oblivion as a pre-dawn fish-poaching "shamateur," after a horrific car accident robs his life of family and music.
At which point Dirt Music begins to feel a lot like Kate Grenville's The Idea of Perfection, as two dyed-in-the-wool loners form an unlikely arc across the turbulence of middle age. But Winton is too crotchety a writer for that. The death of Georgie's mother and the threat of vengeance on Lu from White Point's fishing community set both off on odysseys of their own, with "the impossible amplitude of the continent" coming between them. Winton is interested in the emotional journeys both must embark on before their paths can cross.
As a novel, Dirt Music is as likeably flawed as its central characters. When Lu thinks of Georgie-"Lady, you're all over the place, you've never seen a boundary in your life"-he could be describing the book's unwieldy structure. As the novel zigzags between Georgie's family wranglings in Perth and Lu's episodic hitchhiking encounters en route to the Kimberley (with a narky one-legged surfer and a senior citizen with a passion for James Dickey who is dying of bowel cancer), one begins to long for the muscular brevity of Winton's earlier books.
Soon, thankfully, the landscape takes over. A practicing Anglican, Winton sees the fingerprints of God in nature, and in Dirt Music he is at his poetic best, from the boab trees, "all arse and head-dress in the sun," to the sharks a Robinson Crusoe like Lu plays with at Coronation Gulf: "It's the bodily presence of them that he treasures most, the weight of them in his arms, against his legs, the holiness of their power, the carnal sociability of the buggers."
If Dirt Music's road movie sometimes veers off course, it recovers for a superb finish. As Lu breaks down under the strain of island life, there's the sense of a soul laid utterly bare: "He feels himself within himself. There's nothing left of him now but shimmering presence." And when Georgie and her lobster millionaire fly in to save him, it's Winton at his most powerfully redemptive -and transcendent. Trawling the depths, he surfaces with an ending of remarkable clarity and beauty. Dirt Music might not be the Great Australian Novel, but Winton has delivered another pearl.