He said his place was an old shepherd's hut from the days when they ran sheep on this country. I asked him who owned the land and he said he didn't know, but I reckoned he knew once and things had changed. People are always talking about the damn Chinese buying up land but it could have been anybody. Whoever owned it now, they were in no hurry to do anything with it. There was no stock, no machines, no people. Just him and me and a few wild goats.
The first, very short, chapter of The Shepherd's Hut is absolutely propulsive: Some guy is “hitting the bitumen” in a car, off to collect a girl who's ready and waiting (at least he hopes so), and as he knows what he wants and how to get it for the first time in his life, everybody else better just stay out of the way. Laughing to choking with “a chop in one hand and the wheel in the other”, a shotgun on the passenger seat, and jerry cans of fuel sloshing around the back, I had this total Mad Max vibe; but while the dust and barrenness of the Western Australia salt plains might be familiar territory for fans of the Thunderdome, it turns out this is no near-future dystopia; for our young Jaxie, the apocalypse is entirely personal. Author Tim Winton (new to me with this read) does a masterful job of introducing us to this unlikeable thug of a teenaged punk, and over the course of a book that shows him doing and recalling repugnant acts, we get to know him better. And while we may not end the book liking Jaxie any better, we certainly understand him; are made to question how a fifteen-year-old kid with behaviour issues could already be written off by his community, his family, and at first blush, by us readers. There's magic here.
Our stories. We store them where moth and rust destroy. We're precious about them, no? Not because we treasure them at all, but because it's safer to hold them close.For reasons soon explained, Jackson "Jaxie" Clackton decides to escape his small town on foot; taking to the scrubby gums with inadequate gear; shortly sore and dusty and parched with thirst. Survival is Jaxie's only concern, and in order to keep his feet moving forward when his legs are screaming to stop, his mind goes over stories from better (and worse) times, giving the reader insight into what made Jaxie the hard character we see today:
When I think of Mum now I try to remember her before she got sick. I see her out at the clothesline. Just before a summer storm one time when Cap was away shooting horses and sawing them up into prime Angus beef. The sky was black and the paddocks the colour of bread. And the wind was up before the rain come in and Mum still had her real hair that was flying behind her. I come out on the back step and she was pulling in the shirts and whatnot and the sheets were rippling and I run over there in me bare feet to help. But I forgot about all the prickles and bindies and doublegees so pretty soon I was hopping round like a dancing poof and we're both of us laughing. And I'm happy. When she reaches out for me to keep me from falling over I feel like it's my birthday and not even the bruises up her arms can ruin it.Eventually, Jaxie runs into another man in the wilderness – the disgraced old priest Fintan MacGillis, holed up at an abandoned shepherd's hut – and as Fintan has supplies, Jaxie warily accepts his offer to stay with him a while. The two share stories without ever getting too personal (we never quite learn why Fintan has been exiled by the church – but it has something shady to do with money and power and atrocities witnessed [participated in?] in Africa), and for probably the first time in his life, Jaxie has philosophical conversations with an adult man who treats the boy as an equal.
Oh lad, I know they're only stones. And the moon is only the moon. But they're not empty things, you know. The past is still in them. The force of events long gone, it lingers. These heavenly bodies and earthly forms, what are they but expressions of matters unfinished? Perhaps it's not childish nonsense to see stones as men walking, to behold the moon and feel a twinge of dread. A stone is a fact, a consequence. And the moon, it marks a man's days, does it not? Another month gone, a reminder every cycle that your moment is waning. No wonder it catches in a little fella's chest when he sees it. Mebbe lunatics are men who've remembered they're just men, not angels.Even to the end, the lawless Mad Max vibe carries on – made more disturbing by the fact that Jaxie seems to be constantly fighting for his life in our own “civilised” society: he has had no allies at school, in his family, in the community; there's just the girl he's trying to get to (and the more you learn about them as a couple, the less you're really rooting that this other kid is waiting with a bag packed in her closet for Jaxie to come get her). No matter how tough or profane or badass he acts, Jaxie has childish thoughts and makes immature mistakes; fifteen years old is not an adult, no matter how big or knowing the kid appears. In the opening chapter, Jaxie asks, “So what does that make me?”, and as Fintan eventually insists, one act of kindness is all it takes to prove that what Jaxie is is an instrument of God; as are we all. Between the overall, breathtaking, plot and the fascinating details of character and place, Winton has written a stunning story. But here's my caveat: I wasn't crazy about the constant foreshadowing. Not only do chapters too often end with, But then I got truly lucky. Even if I didn't know it yet, or, I know he always hoped I'd stop and keep him company. He just didn't know what that was gunna cost him, but that first chapter – in which we learn that Jaxie eventually gets a car and things are looking up in his quest to get to Lee – had me constantly looking for a car for him to beg, borrow, or steal; I really wish the ending wasn't telegraphed from the beginning. Still, I'm thoroughly delighted to have read this book and would happily look into Winton again.
