When asked what inspired his new novel Eyrie author Tim Winton says he’s still trying to figure that out. “You never know what you’re imposing after the fact” he says. “My work comes out of the landscape the ecology of a place.”
Through books like Cloudstreet Dirt Music and The Turning Winton has mapped a fictional history of his Western Australia homeland a landscape both wild and remote despite rapid industrialization.
“In my lifetime Australians have progressed from the old settler mindset seeing the land as purely a commodity to viewing the natural world as an important thing in and of itself” he says.
His home on the West Coast is a place where you can be alone in the wilderness which he prefers. “I work in the morning and paddleboard amongst the turtles and whales in the afternoon.”
Eyrie is Winton at his best a noir-inflected tale of disgrace and hard-won redemption. The main character Tom Keely is a depressed pill-popping ex-environmentalist whose once-promising career ended in disaster. “He’s a guy who has given up on the great crusade of his life and life itself” says Winton.
Keely’s wasted days spent puttering around his apartment are interrupted by Gemma an old childhood friend struggling to stay afloat and care for her young grandson. He’s quickly and unwittingly drawn into her troubled life one of shady characters and unpaid debts.
Though Gemma and her little boy offer Keely a chance to be a hero it might cost him his life. “This is a guy who comes from a family of redeemers and rescuers” he says. “He’s got this in-built need to do right and make a difference but in this situation it’s pretty hard to see how he’ll satisfy that impulse.
“All forms of deliverance are temporary” adds Winton. “But all of the imperfect sometimes impractical rescues that make up the impulse for the common good keeps the human race from barbarism I suppose.”
He says Eyrie was partly inspired by the creation of his previous novel Breath which was written in a small apartment building not unlike the one in his new book. “Afterwards I sort of realized that I’d been marinating in this peculiar environment. With a high-rise there’s a forced intimacy with people around you.”
Winton likens the writing of the novel to an old Hollywood western the camera opening onto a barren landscape populated by a lone cowboy. “It’s about a guy forced back into action” he says. “It’s also about this childless man who feels as though he’s part of the first generation of his culture that will leave less for the next one than he was bequeathed.”
The process was a long and intensive one the book taking nearly five years to write. “It takes a while to find the right voice and tone buff and strengthen it up” says Winton adding that it proved difficult to keep this novel from straying into expected territory — the happy ending.
“It’s hard to resist a certain kind of conventional logic” he says. “People always want some kind of revelation closure in our lives and in what we read.
“But life doesn’t offer anyone closure — we die mid-sentence mid-project mid-thought.”
Wordfest presents One-on-One with Tim Winton on October 19 at Theatre Junction Grand.
