First published 1991. Picador paperback, 1992, pp431, c.140,000 words.
For once, a quote on the back cover of this edition, from a review in Time Out, is a rather good summary: ‘Imagine Neighbours being taken over by the writing team of John Steinbeck and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and you’ll be close to the heart of Winton’s impressive tale’: soap opera, heartwarming tales of those at the bottom of the heap in a coastal community and a bit a magical-realism.
The story concerns two families who come to live in a large crumbling house in a suburb of Perth in Western Australia during the final year of the second world war. Their social world is more Cannery Row than Neighbours. Neither of the men are much good at anything. Sam Pickles lost three fingers in an industrial accident and is an obsessive looser at gambling on horses. His wife, Dolly, plays around with other men and is a drinker. Lester Lamb is a serial failure: farmer, war hero, vaudeville artist. His wife, Oriel, is a god-fearing battle axe. They are all fighting their individual demons. Both families have many children, including one of the Lamb’s, Fish, who is mentally disabled. The lives of all these are played out over the next twenty years.
The story is written as a series of fractured vignettes, each being told from the point of view of one of the players, has a title and is between a few lines and ten pages in length. Any individual plot line may include several of these vignettes before reaching resolution. Occasionally one is left with a cliff-hanger like the end of a soap opera episode. Jobs are gained and lost, expeditions are made on the water and the land, couples come together and fall apart, a madman terrorises the city, children are born, some leave, but often return, gambles are lost and won. Somehow the show just about remains on the road: they all love each other really.
Winton’s writing style is slightly awkward: he eschews all marks to indicate speech. It is not always clear what is spoken and what thought and by who. Making something hard to read is not clever. The writing is often reaching for an original metaphor or phrase. Sometimes this works very well, e.g. a ‘booklumpy’ schoolbag [p83], ‘When they thundered round on the last turn, filling the air with sods and dust and great creaturely gasps of horsepower…’ [p86], ‘and the dance spreads, a mad, yokel twenty-year dance that sets the shadows moving in sight behind them where a back man leaves the trees like a bird and goes laughing into the sun with a great hot breeze that rolls the roof of the sky and tilts the leaves above them till the gathering is dizzy with laughter, full and gargling with it.’ [p429, as printed punctuation].
Sometimes however, Winton overreaches: ‘chooks racked along their perch like mumbling hats.’ [p62], ‘the saddest dog to ever find water.’ [p198], ‘his unlaced boots rest beneath him like luggage’ [p198], a character weeping ‘sounded like trains colliding.’ [p321]. On occasion the description is just silly : ‘farts like a statesman.’ [p248], or inappropriate ‘jacknifed the Morris into a carpark’ [p293]: OK, so we know that Toby is a bad driver, but a Morris can’t jackknife, ‘Quick knows the planets from school but he can’t tell one from the other as they blur past like stones someone’s chucking at them.’ [p115]; sorry, planets never ’blur past’: on a minute-by-minute basis they are as static as the stars.
Hovering around the prose are the magical-realism elements: the ‘Shifty Shadow’ that is luck, and the appearance of unreal people: maybe a character seeing themselves walking towards or away, maybe Aboriginal people: ghosts that haunt the land which the white people now occupy. Sometimes this adds a colourful, lyrical feeling, e.g. ‘…although she knew she heard a quiet sustained note in the air, she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just the sound of silence ringing between the curtains and the sofa, in the new painted walls themselves.’ [p382], ‘All he noticed was the way the black man’s shadow came out on four sides of him like a footy player under lights at training.’ [p412], or ‘…they were children, naked children. Placid faced, mildly curious, silent but for their footfalls, rising from the ground like a mineral spring, following the faint defile of the land to a gravity beyond them, faces and arms, eyes and legs travelling in eddies, some familiar somehow in the multitude that grew to a vast winding expanse, passing them with a lapping sound of feet.’ [p426].
Winton uses some Australian period colloquialisms and brands which are mostly understandable in context, e.g. ‘fair dinkum’ [p85], ‘chiaking’ [p1 et al], ‘troppo’ [p64], ‘chooks’ [p62], ‘staggerjuice’ [p1]; a few are not so clear, e.g. ‘junky grids’[p83] – presumably children’s bicycles and ‘Jantzens’ [p295]. Sometimes a word or phrase is repeated rather obviously: ‘chiacking’, ‘pigeontoed’ [p5, p12, p17 – a family characteristic], ‘kids bombing off the jetty’ [p13, p15].
On occasion, Winton hits with a beautiful drawn scene, for example a nicely charged erotic scene between a man and his wife amid the chaos of their lives [p76/7] and the dance quoted from above [p429]. There are some lovely descriptive passages from boats out on the river and sea, and from the vast open and unforgiving Perth hinterland.
Wikipedia biography of Winton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Winton
Wikipedia summary of the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudstreet
Others’ reviews of the book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/343881.Cloudstreet?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_10
© William John Graham, November 2023