Elevated view of decline in Tim Winton's Eyrie

IT is hard to write about Eyrie without first discussing an illustrious forebear of Tim Winton's, especially since he is mentioned in its pages.

A dilapidated high-rise is the home of Tim Winton's underclass subjects in Eyrie.

IT is hard to write about Eyrie without first discussing an illustrious forebear of Tim Winton's, especially since he is mentioned twice in its pages. Norwegian author Knut Hamsun employed stream-of-consciousness narration years before Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

He was a writer "of crepuscular states, of alienation and leaping surrealism", according to critic James Wood, one who "took from Dostoevsky the idea that plot is not something that merely happens to a character, but that a really strange character leads plot around like an obedient dog". "More than most fictional heroes," Wood continues, "the hero in Hamsun writes the novel we read, plots it for us. Yet, like escaped convicts, these heroes erase their tracks as they proceed, and this seems to be hapless rather than willed: they carry no continuous memory of what they have said or done from scene to scene. They seem only to be escaping themselves."

Imagine one of the flamboyantly damaged narrators of Hamsun's fiction transported in time and space, from a park bench in 1890s Oslo to a dilapidated high-rise apartment in present-day Fremantle, and you have Eyrie in a nutshell. Here is the same mordant comedy, the same antagonism directed at the idiocies of the contemporary moment. Its narrator shares all the stuttering consciousness and variable mental weather of Hamsun's great creations.

But this is no pastiche. Winton has adapted these materials and built something new. Eyrie thrums with righteous anger at Western Australia's addiction to mining. It decries the greed and complacency that have attended the wealth such exploitation generates. Winton counterweights his attack with a eulogy for Australia's post-war working class, whose virtues - moral seriousness, thrift, hard work, community-mindedness - are surely shaped by the author's admiration for his parents.

The novel bears witness to how the sprawling suburban world of this older generation, so often perched on the edge of wilder natural landscapes, has been tidied up, boxed in, the ecology of childhood imagination narrowed to PlayStation and satellite dish.

Mostly though, it is a clear-eyed yet compassionate depiction of the underclass that lives off the crumbs of the resource boom. Fremantle, with its mix of bohemians and bourgeois, rough sleepers and well-heeled dog walkers, seems an ideal venue for such an exploration. And Tom Keely, a disgraced former environmental advocate who has dropped out of the middle class and adopted a semi-vagrant lifestyle of booze and pill-popping, is an ideal carrier for Winton's concerns.

Except, that is, for Keely's unreliability as a narrator. We learn from the get-go that he is a man wounded in heart and mind: divorced and unemployed - "just another flannel-tongued Jeremiah with neither mission nor prophecy, no tribe to claim him but family" - shut away from friends and former colleagues, spending his days staring out from an upper floor of the Mirador, a building of dubious architectural merit but grand elevation that has become a default home to Freo's social jetsam.

Winton is tight-fisted in explaining Keely's fall. Partly it is the result of a claim of corruption made against a politician (true, but a career-killer nonetheless), and partly it stems from his ex-wife's office affair. Yet the Hamsun-like elements of his character emerge from the intentional vagueness of these narrative glosses: Keely is ruined beyond the scope of biographical account. Whether it is incipient madness or some physiological malady he suffers from is never made clear. What counts is the extremity of his despair and the way it colours the narration.

Keely is a sieve of leaking memories and his version of events is filled with lacunae - forgotten conversations and missing hours - and weird visions, waking dreams.

This much at least has the clarity and density of reality: Gemma, a childhood ward of Keely's family when he was a teen, has moved into the Mirador, several doors down. Living with Gemma is her grandson Kai, a solitary boy to whom the older man is immediately drawn. Gemma's father was a drunk whose violent attentions Keely's parents, committed Christians, sought to protect her from years before, back when the families were neighbours.

Gemma was a beauty, now somewhat time-worn, who never recovered from the experience. As Keely tentatively renews contact with her he is obliged to accept that the damage she has suffered is greater than any he can claim.

Keely responds to the pair with a mixture of middle-class guilt and genuine desire to help. That he is attracted to Gemma only muddles things, but his growing commitment to the wellbeing of Kai, left nightly to sleep alone in the flat while Gemma stacks shelves, is wholly pure. The boy is watchful, intelligent and fey in ways that unsettle Keely. And the reader is given to hope that the relationship between the two might shake the man out of his tailspin.

That would be another novel, however, by a lesser novelist. Winton consciously sets Keely against the example of his father, a moral and physical giant whose early death evidently left a great hole in his son's heart, and finds him wanting. Where Nev Keely, a working man turned born-again proselytiser, set out with his giant fists to defend Gemma and her family in decades past, Tom lacks the vigour and nerve to do much more than stand shakily by when Kai's parents - his mother an incarcerated drug addict, his father an addled criminal - put the screws on Gemma for cash.

A sense of imminent threat hangs over the latter part of the narrative, and as the pressure grows on Keely to do something, anything, to protect the pair, he responds by going into psychic shutdown. Tense and thrilling as the narrative becomes, Keely's response points to another level of intention on the author's part. This is an ontological drama, and Keely's failure points to flaws encoded in the grounds of the self. Perhaps the narrator is not the only failure here; he may represent an entire generation who, softened by decades of plenty, has failed to live up to the old admonition to be "wise as serpents, harmless as doves" in the face of greed and avarice.

And yet the example of Keely's parents, those mythic paragons of proletarian virtue, cannot be mapped on to the present so easily. A more subtle reading might see Keely as an idealist rendered inoperative by his historical moment. In a world where money always wins, where inequality yawns ever wider, where power is so dispersed as to be everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, the logic of defeat is written into every move made by an honest man. Nev was a bear, admits Tom at one point. But: "This was an era for reptiles, not bears."

This is where young Kai's eccentricity of outlook, his recurring nightmares, his chilling fatalism begin to make sense. If Eyrie is a novel of generational difference in which Tom Keely falls short of his father's grand example of protecting the innocent, then the fate of the boy in a world set to be wrenched forever out of true by changing climate would play on his would-be guardian in devastating ways.

Kai speaks in bizarre non-sequiturs; he is obsessed by ideas of animal extinction and early death. And yet his childish prophecies are more true than the obligatory lies of those who would calm his fears.

Writing these words, I picture Winton's eyebrow rising, his bullshit detector twinkling merrily. However elaborate your analysis of Eyrie, the novel stands, like all of the author's work, on its ability to marry sophistication and simplicity. Page by page it is an engrossing novel; the reader is moved and enraged in equal measure by the plain human story of Keely and his beautiful, battered adoptive family. You long for the good guy to win. You pray and ache for a fresh start for them all. And, as ever, it is couched in the prose of a writer on whom nothing is lost, for whom the tiniest local detail bears an epiphanic charge. Take the moment when Keely finds himself, almost by accident, at a classical music performance, a Vaughan Williams piece:

From the soloist's first brazen thrust he was captivated ... You could feel the ripple of indignation roll across the hall. Maybe it was the woman's bebop stance, the way she appeared to goad the rest of the orchestra. ... All this wild fingering, he felt it could come apart at any moment, yet he was swept up in it, fraught and amazed by the soloist's reckless brio as she began, sally by wheeling sally, to win first the stage, then the auditorium and finally the piece itself ... She was nailing it. Surfing it. Riding the storm into the aisles, past their greying heads and through the bars and braces of their ribs, skating home on the glory of having dared and won.

"Bravo," thinks Keely, "f . . king brava." On finishing Eyrie, I felt much the same.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.

Eyrie
By Tim Winton
Hamish Hamilton, 432pp, $45 (HB)