The Turning

It was my first Winton\’s novels -technically it\’s a collection of short stories interrelated & linked with one another with one major crime story in the centre: corrupted policemen dealing drugs in a small Australian town of Angelus. There are a few stories of individuals going thru one major life changing event or another. Many stories are sad, some full of violence, poverty, sadness, abuse but all deeply touch the heart. Very believable both story lines & characters. The narrative is kept simple without long literary descriptions or reflections, it\’s just fast account of the events & that makes for a gripping read, the sort hard to put down once you started reading. Suffice it to say it encouraged me to get more of Tim Winton\’s prose.

In Tim Winton\’s latest gift to the reading public– and what a gift it is– he includes 17 stories, at least half of which are printed here for the first time. There are similarities in many of them. They are often set in the same place, and some of the characters reappear in different stories. They are often poor, eking out a living from fishing. They seldom leave the little towns they grew up in– unless they are a father– and sometimes a mother– who simply one day walks out, never to return. They are often driven to drink and sometimes fundamentalist religion and may be overwhelmed by what Rick Bragg would call the train wreck in their lives. Some suffer from \”closed-down resignation.\” One mother says that \”they all leave you in the end.\” Their fragile, damaged lives, however, are often tempered by love. One character (\”Commission\”) who has not seen his run-away father in 27 years and has every reason to feel differently, when he sees him again is \”sick with love. . . at the very sight of him.\” Almost to a person, these characters work with the hand they have been dealt, often with little complaining. Fictional characters usually grab us in one of two ways, assuming of course that they are real life flesh and blood to begin with, as Winton\’s always are. They are either exotic and not like anyone we have ever known– anyone Tolstoy wrote about, for example, or, like Winton\’s, they remind us of many people we either now know or have known. Even though these characters inhabit Australia, about as far from the Southern United States as one can go, I recognized many of them. They could have stepped out of the novels of many Southern writers. Harry Crews, for example, in his memoirs published several years ago, remarked that it was not unusual for people he knew as a child growing up in South Georgia to have a missing finger. My paternal grandfather as a young man lost a finger from a horse bite. Much is made in one of Winton\’s stories of a young woman\’s missing finger (\”Abbreviation\”). Another girl has a huge facial birthmark. Others are imperfect in other ways. While all theses stories are exceptional, the best story by far– and one of the best I have read in a very long time– is \”Small Mercies.\” This scalding story is so powerful and the characters so haunting that you will not be able to read another one right away. How Mr. Winton can pack so much sorrow, raw pain and passion into about 30 pages is beyond me, but he does it. The first line, \”Peter Dyson came home one day to find his wife dead in the garage\” sets the tone for this intense story; and the writer does not let up. Dyson, unlike many of these characters who cannot wait to get out of the restrictive towns they grew up in, takes his six-year-old son Ricky and goes back to the house where he was raised in an attempt to put the pieces of his shattered life back together. He runs into Marjorie and Don Keenan, whom he describes as \”full-on people,\” and ultimately their daughter Faye with whom he had– at least according to him– a very unhealthy sexual relationship throughout high school. Faye is also recently back in town, just free from drugs but teetering on a relapse. She would like to see her daughter more (who now lives with the grandparents) and would like to become friends again with Peter and rekindle whatever they had going in the past. She is both sad and manipulative– and as human as your Aunt Edith. It does not seem fair to the rest of us mortals that anyone could write a short story this fine. But as President Jimmy Carter said– and these characters to a person would agree– life is not fair. For the strong-hearted, these stories are not to be missed.

I’m not usually much of short-story fan and so came to the party late re Tim Winton’s collection “The Turning”. I’m so glad I decided to give it a try. The stories are independent yet also linked beautifully through a common connection. As always, Mr Winton’s characters are richly drawn (he shows his skill in being able to do this within the confines of a short story) and are pretty much ordinary people made extraordinary through arresting prose and skilled story telling. If you’re a Tim Winton fan then don’t miss this. If you’re not, then read it anyway you might become one.

tim Winton is an honest empathetic writer. Some of the stories are better than others; some are truly touching.

Wow, I am in awe of Tim Winton. To be able to write like that! This book has some wonderful stories, and the fact that they were all set in the same small town and some involved the same character at different stages in his life was very unique. I just loved the tone of the stories, the way they just set out the way \’life\’ had happened to these people and this is how they were able to deal with it. This was my second Tim Winton book (after Cloudstreet), and I\’m so so happy that there are more for me to delve into. It\’s great when you discover a new (new to me!) writer with such superb talent.

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