Book review: Juice

In my humble but literary-educated opinion, Tim Winton is Australia’s finest living novelist. Since winning publication of his first novel in a competition for young writers in 1981, he has had 10 more novels published, as well as collections of stories, plays, books for younger readers and a handful of non-fiction works. Winton has won Australia’s top literary prize—the Miles Franklin Award—on four occasions. He might now be in line for a fifth.

Having grown up on the unique and beautiful southern coast of Western Australia, the natural landscape is a recurring character in Winton’s stories, in his non-fiction writing and in his activism for a variety of environmental causes and organisations in his home state. He has been a prominent spokesperson for coastal and marine conversation, including a major campaign for protection of the Ningaloo Reef off northwestern Western Australia. Winton even has a fish, native to that region, named after him.

The natural landscape is a recurring character in Winton’s stories, reflecting his deep connection to Western Australia’s coast and his environmental activism

With this background, his new novel Juice has been much anticipated, much lauded and makes the difficult leap, demonstrating that a novel with a cause can also be an engaging read. Juice fits neatly into the growing genre of climate fiction, set perhaps a couple of hundred years in the future in a post-climate apocalyptic world. 

The frame story sees the narrator on the road with a young girl who he has promised to care for, which immediately raises echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—and, on the whole, Juice shares a similar sense of bleakness and desperation. But Juice spends more time retelling the narrator’s story and the larger context of the environmentally challenged world. Vague in many respects, the storytelling allows the reader to imagine the catastrophes that have taken place in the history of the narrator’s time. But even the unnamed narrator’s storytelling has an element of desperation, as he uses his stories to try to establish common ground and arouse the sympathies of a captor.

Despite the obviously degraded ecosystems in which the story takes place, the natural world is still celebrated in Winton’s writing, both in memory and in the state presented in the story. Even a broken world, in which summers are fatal and force the characters to live underground, retains beauty. As the narrator’s mother teaches him, “The first form of revelation is the natural world. Wild, living nature, coherent, intact, independent and unknowable in its abundance and fecundity—its fertility” (page 347).

But Juice is also a brutal story, in its human world as well as the natural world. The narrator is drafted into a guerilla activist force that is working to eliminate the descendants of the families, brands and companies that have destroyed the former world. While the violence is mostly alluded to rather than described, these grim themes and strong language make this a book for mature readers.

The titular “juice” is a reference to the constant struggle for energy in a heat-blasted world, but also to the courage and resilience that allow the characters to continue to struggle for existence, to tell their stories and to resist the destructive forces that continue to be a presence in their world: “A free citizen, a volunteer, can do things for pride and for principle, in hope, and in desperation, that a despot and his vassals simply cannot” (pages 376–7).

Belying the motifs of revenge and violence—perhaps a narrative enactment of Revelation 11:18 (the last book of the Bible) and its promise (or warning) that those who destroy the earth will ultimately be destroyed—Winton describes himself as a religious pacifist and the undertones of faith in Juice are mostly recognisable in the occasional references to and quotations from the “Ancient Sagas”, a number of which are Bible verses that befit the moods and longings of the characters. 

Winton’s work is anger borne of love—for the natural world and for humanity’s place within it.

Juice is intended to be confronting. It is one novelist’s attempt to jolt our world to greater action in response to climate change and environmental degradation. It is anger borne of love—for the natural world and for the human beings who sometimes forget how much they are a part of the environment in which they live. In a recent interview, Winton concluded with his belief that each of us, but also our societies, politicians and other leaders, will shape the future of our planet by our choice between life and money. In his estimation, it is becoming increasingly clear that we cannot serve both.

If you have come across Winton’s work in the past, Juice is a point worth re-engaging his literary work. If not, please accept this author recommendation as a gift from a literary-educated friend who is excited to share some of Australia’s best work.