Quotes of the Day

Politicians looking for a hotline to Middle Australians, the battlers whose dreams and disappointments can determine an election, need look no further than the 17 short stories of Tim Winton's The Turning (Picador; 317 pages). In this trailer park of a collection, characters move from the suburbs to the coast and back again, serial sea-changers in a state of transcontinental drift. There's caravan dweller Raelene, beaten senseless by her craypot-lugger husband, who looks for God between the bruises (The Turning). And teen tomboy Agnes, who spends her evenings wading the shallows for catfish after her drunken father is laid off from the local meatworks (Cockleshell). But most of all there's policeman's son Vic, who helps his mother clean rich people's houses after his dad leaves them, and later becomes a disenchanted lawyer. "In the end there was only a closed-down resignation," Vic says in Commission, "the adult making-do that I'd grown into."

Like Vic, Winton was born in 1960, a policeman's son who moved from Perth to the south coast as a boy. Unlike Vic, the author hasn't much to be disappointed by. With a cabinet of literary trophies for his clean, muscular prose (Nicole Kidman is negotiating to star in an adaptation of his 2002 Miles Franklin Award–winning Dirt Music), this former small-town boy is the ultimate sea-changer. Yet in The Turning, Winton presides as the deity of disappointment - from the opening lines of the first story, Big World, where two beachcombing mates graduate from high school to find "nothing really happens, not even summer itself," to the last pages of the concluding Defender, where Vic's born-again wife Gail is left feeling "strangely deflated." With Winton, that's middle age for you. And it's around this subject that his characters circle. Like the narrator of the best story, Aquifer, who drives to the city upon hearing about a body dredged from a swamp he lived near as a child: "My mind was elsewhere, traveling in loops and ellipses away from middle age on the all-night sound of the moving tide."

In Winton's novels, minor characters are often set adrift only to resurface in other works; here they overlap and metamorphose. The collection's most haunting figure, small-town crim and shark hunter Boner McPharlin, goes from being the sheepskin-coated kid glimpsed in Long, Clear View to the silent driving partner of the narrator of Boner McPharlin's Moll, who, decades later, returns from overseas to nurse him in a psychiatric hospital. At its best, the device creates a poetic sense of ribboning destiny. "Perhaps time moves through us," concludes the narrator of Aquifer, "and not us through it."

Elsewhere, Winton can seem to tread water. Using Vic as a narrative thread for otherwise disparate stories, Damaged Goods and Reunion, in particular, feel padded out. And reading about the marital difficulties of Vic and Gail can be as interesting as a bout of unsuccessful whale watching, to which his characters are also prone. Otherwise, trimmed of its middle-aged spread, The Turning is as lissome as Winton's best prose.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• In Tim Winton's latest story collection, drifters face the ebbing tides of disappointment and middle age