In the post-collapse outback of Juice, people live partly underground Andrew Merry/Getty Images
Tim Winton (Picador)
The latest novel by Tim Winton (twice shortlisted for the Booker prize) is Juice, and it begins in a deceptively familiar, even clichéd fashion. A man and a young girl in a futuristic, pimped-up vehicle are crossing a post-apocalyptic Australian outback. Even in the real world, the outback holds many dangers for the unprepared. Winton’s fictional, far-future outback is so hot and ruined that it is barely survivable even for the extremely experienced and well-prepared man at the wheel. And the girl he is travelling with seems too traumatised to help.
The pair finally stumble on an old mining complex. They hope to find shelter and respite there, but instead end up prisoners of a stranger with a crossbow. The stranger has the white lesions on his face that everyone in this seared world does, but he also has scars that hint at a history of a certain kind of violence. So far, the story could be from Mad Max, or The Girl With All the Gifts, or a host of other post-collapse tales.
Advertisement
But then the true architecture of this extraordinary book reveals itself. To survive the bowman, our narrator decides to sing for his supper. He hopes, we presume, to convince the bowman that he and the girl are no threat and, indeed, that they might help the stranger survive and thrive. Our hero also, we come to believe, senses a shared history with the bowman, one that may even win the captured pair sympathy.
“
Juice is a heavyweight literary novel that sits squarely in the growing canon of ‘climate fiction’
“
And so, from inside a makeshift prison cell, deep underground, our hero relates the story of his life up to that moment. He begins with his early years as a hard-working, innocent, plains-dwelling homesteader. He and his staunch and capable mother live above ground for nine months of the year, and below for the most brutal three months of summer. They must collect water and grow things in the most terrifyingly dry landscape, but they must also guard against possible drowning if huge storms arrive suddenly.
Our hero’s hard but predictable life is disrupted when a secretive organisation recruits him to become a warrior tracking down climate-change criminals. Because when things collapsed, not everyone ended up in vulnerable homesteads on the open plains…
In telling his story, our narrator also reveals the whole history of the world in the post-collapse centuries, from the fossil fuel corporations ushering in doom to the long terrors afterwards. I won’t say more about the plot, except that it is gripping and likely to keep you up at night.
Someone asked me if the book was depressing, and I said no. After all, it is exciting, a great yarn. But it may make you look afresh at all around you. At the conduct of the corporations and the people who sit astride them; at the pitifully slow response to climate change from national governments. Juice asks big questions about culpability and what might be suitable retribution for the descendants of those who are, right now, knowingly taking us closer to climate catastrophe. And, of course, unless you are already a climate saint, the list includes you and me.
So, yes, this isn’t a depressing book per se, but you may find it to be a terrifying one. I very much hope this history of our future never materialises.
That aside, it is a barnstorming, coruscating work of fiction, a heavyweight literary novel that sits squarely in the growing canon of “climate fiction” and it feels to me to be an instant classic of that genre. I strongly recommend it.
Emily also recommends…
Laura Jean McKay (Scribe)
Another outback novel, although very different. This is the story of a strange pandemic that allows those infected to understand the language of animals. Poetic, weird and wonderful.
Emily H. Wilson is a former editor of 91av and the author of the Sumerians trilogy, set in ancient Mesopotamia. The second book in the series, Gilgamesh, is out now. You can find her at emilyhwilson.com, or follow her on X @emilyhwilson and Instagram @emilyhwilson1
Take your science fiction writing into a new dimension during this weekend devoted to building new worlds and new works of art
The art and science of writing science fiction
Topics:
