No fall from grace is worse than that of a good man, particularly if he has done nothing wrong other than to allow his plight to continue damaging him far more than the initial injury ever did.
Tom Keely is the central character of Eyrie, the Australian writer Tim Winton's ninth novel and his first since Breath, in 2008. Keely could well be an Everyman, and he may also symbolise many things, including Western Australia at the mercy of consumerism.
But for all that could, and will, be said about this big novel that airs Winton’s views on his country and on the environmental movement, as well as political causes and the increasing fluidity of social class in Australia, the most important element is Keely. A public figure who ends up a shivering wreck after making a stand, Keely is one of the most convincing characters to emerge not only in Winton’s work but in recent fiction anywhere.
Winton introduces Keely through prose of a quasi-operatic literary and colloquial fervour that builds and builds. Morning lurks in wait for this man who, pulverised by his most recent hangover, keeps his eyes closed, “delaying the inevitable, wondering just how much grief lay in wait”.
The scene is quickly fleshed out, a filthy apartment, 10 floors up, in a decaying tower block, filled with the sounds and smells of other residents, including the crazy woman who lives next door and is given to shouting at her demons. The opening sequence is a desperate and earthy peek into one man’s scrambled thoughts. It is also a daring piece of writing: Winton could lose the reader in the squalor as his beleaguered central character kneels down and sniffs the damp patch on the carpet, fearing the worst.
Winton, author of Cloudstreet (1991), The Riders (1994) and Dirt Music (2001), a questing novelist of estrangement from community and from self, appears to have considered the themes that have dominated his career since An Open Swimmer (1982) and, for all the honours he has gathered, written his finest novel to date.
The nostalgic heroics of beautiful early works, such as the stories in the Minimum of Two collection (1987), have here become beaten, weary and vulnerable if no less heroic and even more profound. For all its harshness – and it is a tough, at times shocking narrative – Eyrie is also wise without becoming knowing.
Forensic intensity embellishes each detail. Keely drags his unwashed body about the neighbourhood through the scalding sunlight and is alert to everything; each sound, every movement makes his head ache even more as the ground tilts relentlessly. Winton is paying close attention to it all; it is his way of deflecting any need to explain too much to the reader.
Keely, with his constant craving for alcohol and pills, has problems, and the only way to find out what happened is to read on. Middle-aged and depressed yet not too stricken to fail to appreciate the view over the booming port of Fremantle, “a philistine giant eager to pass off its good fortune as virtue”, Keely is consummately civilised, and this is clear before it is revealed that he had been a spokesman on environmental issues.
He is overwhelmed by guilt, including over the early death of his father, a saintly man who believed in lost causes. Eyrie, its title playing not only on the height of the vile tower block but also on the many references to birds, is also quite an eerie novel because of the subtle ways in which Winton, never before quite as painstaking in the shaping of a narrative, brings together so many elements and all with the apparent randomness of life itself. He also draws his characters together with an intimacy that has little to do with sex, although the sex in Eyrie is tragic, rough and unromantic, if all the more moving and believable for that.
Another of Winton’s most convincing characters also inhabits this novel. Unlike Keely, this second character is not memorable because of his failings. The young boy Kai is a remarkable creation. Whereas Keely is all too real, the child is strange and saintly, preoccupied by death and terrified of the things adults can do, not only to him but also to each other. He quickly becomes the heart of the book – from his very first words, in fact, overheard by Keely, that “I’m not right in myself”. It is an unusual form of expression, and Keely becomes fascinated – and committed to the child, intent on protecting him. Ironically, Keely remains incapable of helping himself.
The major characters group together, warding off the dangers from the outside world of petty crime and violence. Winton looks at social class in Australia not only through Keely but also through Doris, his mother, who, having spent her younger life as a wife and mother, both to her own children and to the two young Buck sisters, who lived near by and needed rescuing from their vicious father, is now an elderly widow, with a law degree.
The story serves the characters in Eyrie, and Winton's success rests in his handling of them. Chance sets it all up: the little boy is the grandchild of a young girl Keely barely knew. Doris once played mother so well to Gemma Buck that Buck, now 44 and embittered – the most irritating character – cannot forgive her former heroine for now treating her as an adult.
Doris recalls how often she took from her own daughter to comfort those other young girls. The bizarre oblivion through which Keely staggers is brilliantly rendered, and it prepares him and the reader for the inevitable climax of his dilemma.
Breath is an equally intense novel, concerned with testing the limits of fear. But this book is far superior. The characters are more convincing, as is its inspired chaos. It has greater humanity. There are no easy answers, no resolution, just profound resignation and recognition. Winton sustains convincing domestic tension in a narrative that is long and often wordy in its exasperation yet moves quickly as glimpses of beauty are countered by bickering and the threat that seems to stalk Kai.
Breath has its powerful images of waves and surfers suspended in the air; Eyrie is about falling, but it is also about trying to live, or to at least make some sense of the effort it requires to even survive.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent
