ArticleIn Tim Winton’s memoir Island Home, he describes the effect that the Australian landscape has had on his life and sensibilities as a writer. “I’m increasingly mindful of the degree to which geography, distance and weather have moulded my sensory palate, my imagination and expectations”, he writes. “Landscape has exerted a kind of force upon me that is every bit as geological as family.”
Unsurprisingly, then, Winton is a passionate defender of that landscape-as-family. Now a grandfather, he is deeply concerned about what we might be leaving behind as an inheritance. In his latest novel, Juice, he confronts that inheritance head on.
Juice is set in the distant future, a time when climate catastrophe has wreaked havoc on the globe. Civilisation has crumbled. Huge parts of the earth, in a band emanating from the equator, are completely uninhabitable. There are distant memories of “the terror”, when turmoil was universal and provinces and cantons that had once been ordered and prosperous descended into chaos — “fiefdoms based on raiding and slavery”. Water was horded and fought over. “It was said every hamlet and city plaza sported a gibbet”, Winton writes. “Nights were lurid and raucous with public burnings.” His collages of chaotic violence vividly illustrate the global unravelling that could accompany climate devastation.
The novel opens with the first-person narrator (we never learn his name) on the road in the company of a little girl who is not his own but is in his protection. When they stop to inspect an old prospecting camp, they are taken hostage by a man with a crossbow. Locked in an enclosure at the bottom of a mine shaft, a conversation ensues between the two men. The prisoner is buying time and weighing his options, while his captor considers his.
It is from this conceit that the story unfolds. We are taken back to the protagonist’s childhood, eking out an existence with his single mother on a peninsula in Western Australia. Those familiar with Winton’s life and environmental work protecting Ningaloo Reef will recognise descriptions of this region, albeit in ravaged form.
Mother and son are plainspeople and homesteaders who live in the hinterland in proximity to a hamlet of around 500 souls who have organised themselves into an association with a co-op. Each brings whatever they have. We learn that these people have been brought together in calamity and out of necessity, having survived a time when people had fallen into “savagery and magic”. It’s all frightening and sobering. And utterly convincing.
We see years of endless activity focused on survival — the vigilant work needed to preserve water, crops, fuel, machinery and supplies. The mother and son are highly regarded in the hamlet for their ability to cultivate corn, tomatoes, mushrooms, figs and hives of bees. Everyone lives underground in the summer months. Even winter is too hot, however, and survival is dependent on the use of shelter, misters and fans. Heat sickness is an ever-present threat:
The panic of the sickness sent folks out of their minds. Survivors were never the same afterwards … the ordeal — the iniquity of it — robs you of something. Forever after you’re stalked by the shameful mewling thing you became.
Standing up
On occasion the son will head south on trading and salvage missions, in order to supply their camp with essential materials. But we soon discover that he is engaged in another life, a different vocation from that of mere survival. He has been recruited into the “Service” — a highly secretive organisation committed to finding and killing the criminal dynasties, cartels and gangs who have descended from a long line of those who have wrecked the earth. The remnants of these cartels are holed up in opulent, high-tech hideaways in unthinkable luxury, albeit what amounts to little more than a kind of lavish prison existence.
The narrator’s otherwise mundane life on the plain is thus punctuated by death-dealing missions, bringing vengeance upon those purveyors of injustice who accumulated wealth and ravaged the earth. The Service is intent on making this line “extinct” because of the wars they started, the rivers they poisoned, the land and seas they ruined. The missions are targeted and merciless. They are so clandestine that even those teams engaged in the retribution know nothing about each other, or the identities of those they go to “acquit”:
I’ve lived a life of watchful concealment. Yet for a while, and in its way, it was also a form of standing up. Despite my fear. Whatever the odds. To allow myself to see. But to act, too. When so few understood what taking action might mean.
It’s this “standing up” that Winton seems at pains to promote in his novel. We are creatures with agency, creativity and the ability to influence the world around us. To stumble blindly into climate chaos is unacceptable to him, and his frustration finds a macabre catharsis in the fictional destruction of those he holds most responsible:
for all their many technical advantages and comforts, they were no longer fit for the world they’d wrought. The one they’d left us. And, in the end, there were too few of them, and their fear or delusions of superiority were no match for our conviction. Because for us the work was Holy. We handed it on, a sacred task, from generation to generation.
The narrator is driven by this purpose: “a free citizen, a volunteer, can do things for pride and for principle, in hope, and in desperation, that a despot and his vassals simply cannot”.
Expelled from paradise
Juice takes place after the Fall. The “garden” is a faint memory lost to most people whose existence is one of relentless toil for survival, with no rest much less sense of feasting or joy. There is a profound sense that all is broken to the point that it can’t be set right. And it is all our own doing. We’ve not understood the consequences of our action and inaction.
In a conversation between the narrator and one of his trainers in the Service, there is a direct reference to the story of Adam and Eve, remembered here as an ancient myth of expulsion from paradise. The trainer explains that while knowledge is gained in the eating of the forbidden fruit, “there is a grief in the knowledge” and an irrevocable loss as the couple become exiles:
[The myth offers] a chance to remind ourselves of what it means to be human. Don’t you think? Before they break their limits, those people are like us, but not quite us. We’re conscious. With knowledge. Curiosity. Imagination. It’s a reminder of the burden that comes with those gifts. And, I guess, the consequences that come from shirking that burden.
After our likeness
There is almost no wildlife in Juice and a dramatic encounter with a wedge-tailed eagle when the narrator is still a small boy is all the more moving because of this absence. Warnings abound in the novel. The subject matter for someone as personally invested as Winton could pose a risk that he become preachy — a cardinal sin for a novelist. But here we are in safe hands. The novel is full of surprises and stunning originality, even though it fits in an increasingly familiar cli-fi genre.
One such surprise comes in its treatment of technology. Most of the people in this story operate in a world that has lost the technological infrastructure that once held life together. As such their piecemeal existence contains remnants of machine-driven life and echoes of a high-tech civilisation. But for the most part, they are living at a subsistence level akin to pre-industrial times.
Not so for the Service, however, nor for the targets of their missions of elimination. These people operate with sci-fi tech of flight and weaponry. Robotic imitations of humans — “Sims” — are used by the cartels as slaves and servants. It’s hard to distinguish between them and real human beings. There are echoes here of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, in which a woman trains a robot to imitate and eventually replace her terminally ill daughter. But unlike Ishiguro’s melancholic vision, the robots here might prove to be more human than the humans — exhibiting more honour and civility, more kindness, more adaptability.
This is not what you’d expect from Winton, and it speaks to his profound disillusionment with where he thinks humans are as a species.
On alien ground
It may well be that the overwhelming sense of loss that pervades this story is what lingers most with the reader. There are hints of the former glory of the natural world. “Islands that used to be covered in forests, with two hundred kinds of birds”, now just “bare, baked rock”. As one character says:
My mother used to tell me that when nature dies, God dies along with her. She said the first form of revelation is the natural world. Wild, living nature, coherent, intact, independent and unknowable in its abundance and fecundity — its fertility … I guess what my mother meant is that without clean, wild, healthy things that can generate and renew themselves, the idea of God is impossible to imagine.
Here resides an essential aspect of Winton’s thinking. We are creatures — fragile and dependent, living in a fragile, contingent creation for which we are responsible. And our connection to the creator springs from and is nurtured by the natural world — the first form of revelation. When we lose that connection to nature, we lose something essential to our humanity. And for Winton, that estrangement is already well underway, with devastating consequences. As the narrator puts late in the story:
[T]he world had taken a step away from us. While we weren’t looking, we’d let ourselves come adrift. And whatever we achieved from here on would be on alien ground.
It is a grim picture. And yet Juice it is not completely without hope. The novel’s central character, though damaged and deeply scarred, maintains a vital sense of agency and somehow avoids complete despair. There is a sense that, as long as there is any decency left in people, there is a reason to keep going, to keep fighting.
But can human decency be maintained? It’s not clear that it can. And with this, Winton poses a tantalising and urgent question within an already terrifying narrative. I, for one, gasped in the face of it.
Simon Smart is the Executive Director of the Centre for Public Christianity. Tim Winton delivered the annual Richard Johnson Lecture in Sydney on 21 October 2024, entitled “Exiles at Home: What our Contempt for Nature is Costing Us”.