By James Ley
Juice
Tim Winton
Hamish Hamilton, $49.99
Certain aspects of Juice will feel familiar to dedicated Tim Winton readers. Its narrator is a rueful middle-aged man, separated from his wife and daughter, looking back at his life and trying to make sense of his mistakes and losses. He has grown up on a dusty West Australian farm with his mother, a font of tough love and worldly wisdom. At times, he seems to have suspiciously ornate vocabulary for someone without any formal education, though he salts his poetic turns of phrase with vintage slang.
What is unusual – in fact, a radical departure – is that Juice imagines people will still say things like “fanging” and “busting my freckle” some 150 years or more into the future, these idioms having endured beyond societal collapse on a global scale.
Its story unfolds in a world where the consequences of global warming have rendered the planet almost unlivable. Intolerable conditions in the equatorial band between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn have driven people toward the poles. The land is scoured by lethal heat. Cycles of civil unrest, the most recent known simply as “The Terror”, have led to the breakdown of centralised government. People crowd into filthy walled cities or take their chances in improvised compounds that run on slave labour, or scratch out marginal existences in remote settlements where the only economy is salvage and barter.
Winton has long been an outspoken environmentalist. The alarming future he depicts is, quite explicitly, an indictment of all those future-eating fossil-fuel corporations that continue to profit at the expense of humankind. What is intriguing about Juice is the interaction between its unexpected generic elements – which extend beyond dystopian science fiction to militaristic action-adventure scenes – and its introspective qualities.
The narrative structure is important. The opening sequence is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, crossed with something of the feral junkyard aesthetic of the Mad Max films. The narrator is travelling across an ashen landscape in the company of a young mute girl, trying to avoid capture, only for their luck to run out when they encounter a paranoid hermit with a crossbow, who holds them hostage. Sensing the “bowman” has a connection to the militant organisation he once belonged to, the narrator tries to win his trust – or at least stall him until they can escape – by recounting his entire life story.
In Tim Winton’s new novel, Juice, the action extends beyond science fiction to militaristic action-adventure scenes.Credit: Tamara Dean
The Scheherazade set-up licenses the narrator’s soul-searching, but also ironises it. The bowman, who understands perfectly well that his prisoner is trying to blag his way out of trouble, interrupts periodically to cast doubt on the story and accuse the narrator of being a windbag. The more significant effect of the confessional mode is that it turns the novel in on itself. As the narrator tells the dramatic story of his recruitment into an underground network fighting a guerilla war against the perpetrators of the global catastrophe, he expresses qualms about the organisation’s ruthless tactics and reflects on the way his radicalisation drew him away from his domestic responsibilities.
Cli-fi is a relatively new genre; its characteristics are still evolving. But it has a defining formal problem – namely, how to square the fact that global warming is occurring on a scale incommensurate with the small dramas of individual lives, when the latter are the humanistic foundations of the novel form. This is why so much cli-fi turns to science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, the broad strokes of genre fiction – anything that throws the issue into relief, casts our minds beyond everyday concerns and forces us to think structurally and collectively.
Juice’s introspective side makes it equivocal on this point. Novels written in a similar spirit of condemnation, such as Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood and Andrew McGahan’s The Rich Man’s House, have cast the exploiters and despoilers as outright villains. In Juice, the bad guys don’t really feature as characters. The focus is on the ethics of resistance and the struggle to retain a sense of humanity in catastrophic circumstances – something the novel links to the responsibilities that come with knowledge.
In the world of Juice, the breakdown of society has swept away most of human history, though fragments of cultural memory survive in the mythologised form of the “sagas” in which it is possible to recognise lines from famous poems, Bible verses and Marx’s dictum “from each according to ability, to each according to need”. The contrast with the incriminating evidence that radicalises the narrator is pointed: the former is a collective expression of humanity, the latter a spur to violent retribution.
The novel registers its unease here. The narrator’s disempowerment as he becomes disillusioned and his personal life crumbles is also, notably, the point at which the sacramental and the sacrificial reemerge, in the post-human form of angelic “sims”: humanoids, created as slaves for ultrawealthy climate criminals, that have developed a capacity for compassion, loyalty and justice.
Their late appearance suggests the indomitability of a not-exactly-human spirit, though in the wider context of the novel, it seems an ambiguous triumph. Throughout Juice, characters are repeatedly praised for being “staunch”, a word that appears about 500 times. An admirable quality, but cold comfort in a world that has already been reduced to a smouldering ruin.
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