Dirt Music - Hardcover

Winton, Tim

3.87

14,219 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330490249 ISBN 13: 9780330490245

Publisher: Picador, 2002

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Georgie Jutland is a mess. At forty, with her career in ruins, she finds herself stranded in White Point with a fisherman she doesn't love and two kids whose dead mother she can never replace. Her days have fallen into domestic tedium and social isolation. Her nights are a blur of vodka and pointless loitering in cyberspace. Leached of all confidence, Georgie has lost her way; she barely recognises herself. One morning, in the boozy pre-dawn gloom, she looks up from the computer screen to see a shadow lurking on the beach below, and a dangerous new element enters her life. Luther Fox, the local poacher. Jinx. Outcast. So begins an unlikely alliance. Set in the wild landscape of Western Australia, this is a novel about the odds of breaking with the past, a love story about people stifled by grief or regret, whose dreams are lost, whose hopes have dried up. It's a journey across landscapes within and without, about the music that sometimes arises from the dust.

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Review:

Arguably one of the finest of all Australian novelists, Tim Winton shows that he remains on top mid-season form with Dirt Music, a wistful, charged, ardent novel of female loss and amatory redemption. The setting is Winton’s favourite: the thorn-bushed, sheep-farmed, sun-punished boondocks of Western Australia. The cast is limited but spirited: the two chief protagonists are a fortysomething adoptive mother with a vodka problem called Georgie Jutland, and a brooding, feral, bushwhacking poacher, Luther Fox.

The plot is something else altogether: an elegantly wearied, cleverly finessed mutual odyssey, that opts to follow the sometimes intertwining, sometimes diverging lives of poor Georgie and Luther, as they try to deal with the odd alliance they comprise, as well as the complex and fractured lives they want to leave behind. The way Georgie deals with her unwitting inheritance of two dissatisfied adopted kids is particularly touching, poignant, and well written.

Best of all, though, is the prose. Somehow it manages to be simultaneously juicy and dry, like a desert cactus. This is especially true when Winton touches on the scented harshness of the Down Under outback: "the music is jagged and pushy and he for one just doesn’t want to bloody hear it, but the outbursts of strings and piano are as austere and unconsoling as the pindan plain out there with its spindly acacia and red soil". This is a wise and accomplished novel. --Sean Thomas

Review:

...a cracking page-turner which deftly splices together separate narrative threads without ever losing its headlong momentum... -- Economist

...vividly written in a seemingly effortless prose that never puts a foot wrong... keeps you turning the page... -- Sunday Times

Fox is an exceptional creation... one of the most richly imagined journeys in modern fiction. Tim Winton is the real thing. -- Scotland on Sunday

The unforgiving Australian landscape is described with arresting vividness in Dirt Music... a compelling novel. -- TLS

Winton's writing is a heady blend of muscular description, deep sentiment and metaphysics... a beautiful celebration of his country. -- Sunday Telegraph

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