Late last year in Australia’s The Monthly, Tim Winton wrote an essay on the urgent need for writers to look the climate crisis in the eye. Quoting Amitav Ghosh’s observation about the ‘patterns of evasion’ that continue to conceal the scale of the catastrophe, he argued that writers must overcome the habits of mind that treat the natural world as an inert externality. Instead, they must find ways to recognise that we are part of nature, and our fate is inseparable from the world around us. ‘We have difficult work to do,’ he declared. ‘And we’re late to the bushfire.’
Of course, Winton is not someone who could ever be accused of treating the natural world as mere window-dressing. For more than 40 years, his fiction has been engaged in an ongoing conversation with the Australian landscape and the legacies of beauty and trauma encoded within it. Nonetheless, it’s difficult not to read his latest novel, Juice, as an attempt to rise to his own challenge. Set several generations from now in a world transformed by rising temperatures, and incorporating explicitly science fictional elements such as synthetic humans and energy weapons, it takes aim at the economic systems and industries that are driving the climate crisis. It also explores ideas of connection and the possibility of hope in dark times.
The unnamed narrator is raised in a homestead on North West Cape/Palydi Manu, halfway up Western Australia’s coast – ‘not a place for the faint-hearted’. The summers are so hot that the only way to survive them is to retreat underground: in winter, staying too long outside can also be deadly.
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