Great Reads for Great Readers

 

Juice, by Tim Winton.

 

            An old man and a little girl travel east in a land turned to ash and desert;  eventually they stop for shelter at an abandoned mine works – except that it isn’t abandoned:  a bowman is in residence and fancies the look of their transport, and the batteries that power it.  He takes them prisoner and, to play for time, the old man tells him the story of how they arrived at this last Godforsaken place in the southeast of what used to be Australia – before human greed and power-hungry tinpot dictators wrecked the planet by fossil-fuel extraction – Juice.

            Tim Winton has written a frightening, dystopian and brilliant story in spare, beautiful language of the consequences of climate change, global warming, and how the remainder of the population survived ‘The Terror’ – when nature got payback for all the overuse of precious resources;  now survivors use all their ingenuity to keep batteries going so that they can have light and transport, and formerly big cities are now walled to repel lawless bandits.  The old man paints a stark picture of his childhood in a hamlet near the tropic of Capricorn, raised by his strict but loving mother as a plantgrower:  money no longer has any power;  food of all kinds is the currency:  food can be traded for other commodities – building materials, fowls for eggs and spare parts for the vehicles.  It is a very simple, lonely life, but when he is seventeen, he is recruited into a secret organisation called the Service, where all members are Operators, and trained in many and various ways to ‘acquit’ the world’s polluters – ‘acquit’ being a euphemism for assassinate:  the teen doesn’t tell his plantgrower mum that he has been recruited;  he just says that he has to go foraging for whatever he can find that is useful, even though he sometimes sustains serious injuries, but he doesn’t want to worry her.

            Or Sun, his great love, and the daughter he has with her, Ester (The only two named characters in the book), who eventually abandon him when he is absent ‘foraging’.  Now he is self-appointed guardian of the mute little girl, and wants to team up with the bowman;  he feels that they would survive well as a team – unfortunately, the bowman doesn’t feel the same way; he covets the old man’s transport:  who will survive?

            Tim Winton is an enormously respected Australian novelist – this could be his magnum opus, especially as the theme he tackles affects us all, and no-one could be more adept at describing our headlong rush to wreck the planet than he.  This is the best book I have read this year.  SEVEN STARS.