By David Uptin
*Spoilers ahead!*
I’ve only finished a Tim Winton book once in my life – Breath, which I read in 2020. Cloudstreet, considered by many his magnum opus, was the last book I began without finishing. To be transparent, I did not open Juice, his newest release and first since 2018, expecting to enjoy it.
Juice opens on an unnamed narrator, carrying a mute child across a vaguely Australian landscape, who is kidnapped by an unnamed bowman. This may sound confusing to you; full disclosure, this is far from a beach read. Like most books of its size, Juice is something to devote your full attention to, a text to provoke thought and mental work.
The story centres itself slightly after this introduction; the core plot is an in-universe recount of the narrator’s life, spoken to the bowman. He is raised in a remote Western Australian hamlet, far into the future. Juice could loosely be called a climate dystopia; temperatures frequently reach the fifties, and the hamlet must live underground in summer due to these conditions. The text references periods such as ‘the Dirty World’ and ‘the Terror’, implying that the 2024 we know is part of the Dirty World:
“…I couldn’t help but think of the Dirty World as an age of wonders… some lived entirely without the burden of labour…
“Of course the Dirty World was rotten to the core. It seems too good to be true because it was. Every miracle comes at a cost – a river poisoned, a people enslaved, a species or language expunged.”
The Terror, meanwhile, is a cataclysmic event which followed, leading to the dissolution and reorganisation of governments (Utah is an independent republic, for instance?).
However, I don’t wish to spend much time discussing how this dystopia came about, because Winton doesn’t. In such a dense book, his focus is razor-sharp, eschewing any elements of worldbuilding that are not strictly relevant. While this can be frustrating, I paradoxically think there is beauty in Winton’s vagueness. Unnamed narrators and a lack of quotation marks are confusing (especially for review writers!), but if the protagonist’s name had been revealed, the story would have felt cheapened. Winton has approached this book knowing precisely what details he wants the reader to focus on, deploying and withholding them with compelling care.
Upon reaching adulthood, the narrator is persuaded to join a vigilante group known as the Service, whose mission is to hunt down and kill descendants of groups they call criminal clans (those who polluted the planet and caused the Terror). His participation in this occupies the bulk of the plot, as he is torn between loyalty to his family and loyalty to the Service, with its chaos and divine-seeming purpose:
“After being acted upon all your life, along comes the invitation to act. And once the horror and surprise recede a little, the surge of juice in your veins, that sudden fierce determination takes hold. Brother, don’t you miss that?”
The Service is one of the most compelling elements of the text, morally grey in the most thought-provoking way, and another shining example of Winton’s talent at deploying information to create intrigue. Something which the narrator mentions throughout the text is a chant, sung by Service operators, reciting the names of the vanquished. The specific names, however, are not explicitly mentioned until two thirds of the way into the text:
“…as years passed… we sensed we might be singing our own deeds, the achievements of our moment, and that, brother, that was intoxicating.
“But I never expected to live long enough to chant the most dreaded name of all.”
Placed on a pedestal is this “Name Above All Names”, “…the giant who ate children.” When the list is finally revealed, the moment is destabilising, but the reveal of this ultimate name is withheld until much closer to the end.
I have not been so impacted by a single literary moment all year.
Because it’s a name everyone knows. I’ve deliberately omitted any mention of it. It obviously does not name a literal giant who eats children, but let’s just say it may as well.
For hours after that reveal I paced my apartment, unable to call peace into my soul. I thought of every time I had heard this name spoken, written, mentioned. I felt as though a ghost were chasing me and I could not escape it. Every step I took felt haunted by the future I am part of creating.
What are we? Are we an age of progress?
Or are we, in fact, the absolute dirtiest of worlds? Is everything we do to make ourselves more comfortable bringing about the dystopia of which Winton writes? Will the floodwalls we protect ourselves with burst, and usher in this age of labour, suffering, death?
“Such is the legacy of this empire, these people. This is how they achieved immortality. Because even now they write our days and nights.”
To say I enjoyed Juice would be too simplistic. I’m reflecting on Tegan Bennett Daylight’s essay ‘The Difficulty is the Point’, in which she quotes British academic Mark Fisher:
“‘Some students want Nietzsche in the same way they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp… that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.’”
Daylight relates this to her experience teaching literature to students who approach life as a pleasure-seeking exercise, and I genuinely cannot think of a recent experience I have had that stands against this pleasure approach to life more than reading Juice. It is a bleak, dark read. The language is often beautiful, but the landscape it describes is unforgiving, not a place I am fleeing to in my head any time soon.
Yet it has proven one of the most impactful and memorable reads of my year, one whose quotes I will treasure and recite for decades to come, one whose message I do not see ceasing its haunt of my soul any time soon.
David Uptin is an emerging writer, currently living in Magandjin/Meanjin (Brisbane) and originally from Yugambeh country (the Gold Coast). He is in his final semester of undergraduate Creative Writing at QUT. He is an editor of and occasional reader at the QUT Literary Salon and is currently on the Editorial Board of ScratchThat Magazine. He has been published in both ScratchThat Magazine and QUT Glass. David has three novels currently on the go, all in the vaguely literary, contemporary young adult/new adult realm, but given there are three of them, don’t expect to see anything on bookshelves soon! When not reading or writing, David enjoys listening to iconic female pop albums and going for walks in Victoria Park.
