Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Juice
By Tim Winton
Penguin books
October 2024, ISBN: 9781761344893, 528 pages, RRP: $49.99aud
Tim Winton’s latest book, Juice, is big enough in both size and scope to be called an epic. Its stark dystopian landscape conjures a scene that is brutal and unforgiving. Size notwithstanding, Juice is a fast read, driven by a series of unexpected revelations. These discoveries–both of situation and self–are revealed through the story’s prgression as the narrative winds through its broken landscape in perfect sync.
The novel opens with an unnamed character driving in a barren landscape. We don’t have a lot of information but we know the weather is hot, dangerously dusty and unpredictable, and that there is a young girl in the car who won’t speak. The the man and girl come to an abandoned mine shaft where the man thinks he might set up a safe haven for them, when a crossbow wielding and hostile owner captures and locks both of them in a wire enclosure inside the shaft. He then pulls out a chair, and insists on the man’s story. From that point the narration is driven by the man telling his life story in flashback form with occasional interruptions from the captor. Ostensibly, the storytelling is a means to keep both the man and the child alive, but as the story progresses it becomes clear that the narrator wants more than simply safety or freedom. He wants connection and a sense of hope in a world where there is little of either:
I’ll be you’re no different. You had to be riddled with doubt, given to wishful thinking. Tired—so bone-tired – of holding out. But you pressed on stubbornly. In hope. In search of something decent. And here you are brother. And her I am. Tonight. In this, our current predicament. (505)
There has been much made of Juice being a departure for Winton and there’s no denying that this is a different setting to most of his work: the small towns of present day Western Australia. This is set in the ravaged future, but the writing is classic Winton. The location does seem to still be WA, with a rich, if tortured, setting with human relationships at its core. These are mostly familial: a boy and his mother, a child and her carer, two parents and a young child – all recognisable and all rich with the complexities of those relations under the duress of environmental disaster. The setting is like a character of its own, providing pivot points and links as momentous as the human relationships. Winton’s world is in some ways, a sentient Earth whose connection to humanity is integral to the story:
In our lamp beams, every surface of the chamber danced with reflections….I helped her off the sill and showed her the long duct that filled the narrow floor of the cave, stretching back int the darkness. We sat. Shucked off our boots. Soaked our feet as the ripples scintillated eery surface. (185)
There are plenty of twists in the work, and part of the joy of reading Juice is how it unsettles the reader in unexpected ways. One of the themes that Winton leans into–another classic theme for the writer–is the notion of culpability. I found this particularly moving. In his session with Rosemarie Milsom at the University of Newcastle, Winton said that everything he wrote about in Juice was a likely climate science scenerio. His is not a hypothetical Mad Max inspired made-up world where a single commodity collapses. It’s based on scientifically accepted and understood evidence and models. That’s part of what makes this book so chilling but also, given the time setting of this book, why the question of culpability sits squarely within the purview of the reader. Winton is careful not to point a finger at any person in particular (though we can all think of names) but there are clear villains, and the trajectory is one that points to the excesses we are all enjoying now at the expense of the future. So the blame sits squarely with our generation. It’s not possible to look away, because the story is not a didactic one but rather, takes us on a journey about relationships and love and about what might survive and how. The deed has already been done and Winton writes with characteristic subtlety and beauty. However, the link between past and present cannot be avoided, and it’s hard to read about the pain of the future without thinking about how it was created by what we’re doing now:
In the hamlet or out on the homesteads, life was s struggle. Winters were hot. The summers lethal. Nearly every soul you met had white scab, and many suffered pink cankers that ate at them slowly. Locals were hardy and adaptable, but it was rare to see people of great age. (22)
Another theme that stood out was the notion of sentience, which is integral to the way in which the story develops. A First Nations perspective would equate our impending ecological destruction to a sense that we are all part of a single, sentient Earth and that the meta-crisis is grounded in this disconnect between the human and the more-than-human. This is again, handled with a great deal of care by Winton but he certainly doesn’t avoid it. Treating nature as a commodity for commerce is akin to treating humans as commodities for commerce – slavery for example – another theme that is explored in the book. The implications of the destructive hierarchies that power our world are explored in a myriad of ways, some brutal and some beautiful. I won’t detail where this leads in the books (some reviews have) but any kind of redemption comes from a sense of connection with the more-than-human, as when the narrator is shown a vision how life was and could be:
I was deep in the sea, and it was alive, with a million fish – bronze and silver and gold – pressed against me in one shimmering, quivering phalanx. And I was just like them, one of them, swimming effortlessly. The water was cold and clear. I felt safe, one of many, and we were all turning, turning, weaving and twitching as one, like a single creature, at one purpose, baking and diving through the soup of increase and possibility in which we were all suspended. (226)
The book pivots around the idea of its title, “Juice”, which is a life force, energy and desire to move forward, but also water, fuel, the sun (and the character named Sun), batteries, ingenuity and maybe even sentience – going back to that point again, a kind of entanglement. Seeing others as different from ourselves or seeing ourselves as singular beings rather than part of a collective biological system both internally and externally is an illusion. This is the kind of Western, anthropocentric, binary thinking that got us to the point this novel opens with. This is just one of the many layers of deceit that are woven through the book. Some are created via love or a desire to protect the objective of love, some relate to loyalty, some are necessary for survival, and some are for personal gain. The whole notion of what is true and what is false, something we are all grappling with today, is brought into play as even the narrative is put into question when the crossbow captor begins to wonder just how much of the narrator’s story can be trusted.
The book is full of many different tensions, with the narrative driven forward by its progressive timeline–the narrator’s coming-of-age and awakening, but also by the sense that there is a danger. At some point the story will catch up to the man with the cross-bow and what he symbolises. This tension and the interplay of the book’s many prescient themes make for a deeply engrossing read that stays with the reader. After one reading the temptation is to immediately go re-read from the beginning with all the implications in mind, but there is also pleasure in letting the work sit for a bit. Juice is an important work that will not disappoint Winton fans but which also extends and connects his nonfiction, activist work and his fictional abilities in a way that is chillingly and consistently powerful.