Winton is a master wordsmith and consummate storyteller. His language is poetic, his characters convincing, and his beloved Western Australia usually features as the sun-soaked-sparkling-sea backdrop.
But his tales often delve into the dark depths of humanity, with self-destructive characters dealing with loss, pain and self-doubt, in a world that can be harsh and unfair.
It is his ability to blend the two that makes his fiction so compelling.
In Eyrie, the reader stumbles into the world of Tom Keely, an environmental advocate who has lost his job because of his claims and is now unemployed and unemployable, divorced, bitter and disillusioned. In scenes reminiscent of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, the reader makes their way with Keely as he recovers from his latest drink/drug/heat-induced hangover from hell.
Winton manages to convey in a few words what takes some authors paragraphs or pages to explain, and he skilfully begins to transport us from feeling the same fear and loathing of Keely that he has for himself as he slowly draws a character of morality and conviction but whose life has hit rock bottom.
Ironically, but perhaps because his life has literally been turned upside down, he is now surveying life predominantly in a bird's-eye view from his dilapidated apartment on the top floor of a Fremantle tower block.
A chance encounter with a neighbour whom he hasn't seen since childhood and a strange young boy draw him slowly out of his self-pity and give him a new cause to fight for, and a nail-biting story that takes us further into the seedy underworld and sweeps the reader along.
Eyrie is a story about the heights to which we aspire, and the depths to which we can fall. It is a story about family, beliefs and morality, of innocence and experience.
It is about predator and prey: who has the killer instinct (whether it is the sharks of the corporate world or the underworld) and who has the capacity for survival?
And in Eyrie, Winton reminds us it is not when, if, how or why we will fall in life - it's a given we will - but who will be there to catch us when we do.
- Helen Speirs is ODT books editor.
