Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24922 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The writing of Tim Winton has long been noted for its elegance, precision and keen insight into the human soul. With The Turning, we are given one of the most precise and satisfying distillations of the novelist's art, albeit in what has long been something of an unfashionable form: the short story. The form is often regarded by publishers as something of a commercial liability, even though many great writers (from Somerset Maugham to William Trevor) have excelled in shorter fiction. But Winton, as well as being one of the finest novelists Australia has ever produced, is also a master of the form. The seventeen overlapping tales here encapsulate some of the most insightful observations that he has given us.

What makes the stories so unusual is the fashion in which Winton has managed to find the unusual within the everyday--here, ordinary people are subjected to extraordinary pressures, and everything from middle-aged loss to youthful vacillations of the heart crafted with great skill.

Winton (who was born in Perth in Western Australia) has published fifteen books and has won a variety of literary prizes. The stories here can only add lustre to his reputation. Big World is the story of a friendship between two undergraduates who take on unsatisfactory jobs one frigid January, such as sluicing the blood from the floor of a local meat factory. The duo set off by car in pursuit of diversion, and we learn that neither is particularly lovable (particularly the eccentric Biggie); as the tale advances, the narrator learns to his cost that friendship comes at a price. This immensely involving piece is written in the kind of lambent prose that often aspires to the condition of poetry, despite the banality of the two young men's lives. Similarly, The Turning deals with trailer life, and its unhappy, unfulfilled working-class women are brilliantly characterised. Whatever your feelings about the short story form, you will be doing yourself a disservice to miss this collection. --Barry Forshaw

Yorkshire Post
‘Each character is skilfully knitted into the narrative fabric’

Sunday Times
'Beneath the immediate-impact surface robustness, these stories are threaded through with subtleties and oblique connections.'

Customer Reviews

the great tim winton
After reading 'dirt music' and 'the riders', this was my third Tim Winton.A collection of short stories,each one better than the last,weave a vision of characters which are somehow connected.Jumping from one person narrating to another,using different time lines,it keeps you guessing.Evoking Austraila only as Winton can,this book and its characters stay in your mind for a long time.A brilliant read.

The Annals of Angelus
There's a special appeal to the "linked" short story collection. Although the same names and places appear, each is new with the next story. The desperate men, the battered wives, the confused and bewildered children. They interact in their own ways, coming together and breaking apart over the years. In the hands of a master storyteller like Winton, each tale is a spark of reality. Every individual comes almost startlingly alive in but a few pages. As the sequence unfolds through the view of the protagonist, you gain fresh insights on circumstances. Absolute values have no place here, a lesson most of us would do well to remember.

The tales are set in a coastal town in Western Australia. Angelus is a fishing community - often under stress from unemployment, it is a contained locale. Children grow up as neighbours, move through school together, and interact in almost wildly varying ways as they mature. There are mysteries - why was a boy left broken and battered on a beach? Who was the girl found dead in a school loo and how did she die? Who escaped the almost desolate town and how bound do they remain to it in later years? These are common situations and questions in a small town, and the economic pressures add intensity to the expected conditions we all endured in adolescence. It is a credit to Winton's outstanding prose skills that beauty emerges within this forlorn community. A coastal location always provides a sense of expanded view lacking in inland towns. Yet here, as almost everywhere in Australia, the desert looms as an ever-present menace, poorly understood and a block to escape even mountains fail to match.

Vic Lang, the character around whom these stories weave, emerges first as a young child at a beach party. His life is complex. While in school, a girl with a facial birthmark fascinates him, but that's not the girl he marries. His attachments are intense and sometimes offbeat. He takes up with "Boner" McPharlin [the term comes from his job in an abattoir], the Huckleberry Finn of his time and place. Totally without ambition, Boner's presence gives Vic a basis for comparison with his own life. It's a shaky foundation to launch into adulthood. Vic symbolises the small-town outlook with his sense of being under constant scrutiny. In "The Long, Clear View", Vic reflects on his life and how the town imposed so much of itself on his later life.

North American readers often balk at the "culture shock" of Australian conditions and language. Winton's deft touch softens the shock to what might be deemed a "culture tickle". His character portrayals and the manner in which he deals with the passage of time among what become familiar people, guide the reader effortlessly through some unfamiliar terms and conditions. What does "shoot through" mean? It has nothing to do with weapons. It means "escape" or "desertion" depending on the protagonist's viewpoint. A "jacaranda" turns out to be a tree, ugly when not blooming, but a stunning array of colour in the proper season. If a blossom falls on while walking underneath, it is said to be a sign of good luck. Does that happen in Angelus?

Winton's realistic view of people and events is at odds with much of today's literature. His voice, while grim and sometimes even bleak, doesn't overwhelm the reader with despair. His people aren't crushed by events, they remain battlers even in the most seemingly desperate circumstances. You must, however, traverse the entire sequence to understand how they accomplish that feat. While each story stands entirely on its own, like a brick-built building, they must all be taken together to perceive the entire stunning edifice. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Gritty and thought - provoking
Don't think of this as a set of short stories, as characters spill from one story to another, illuminating both what you read and stories you have finished.

Winton writes about life on the other side of the tracks in Australia, with descriptions so vibrant that you feel the heat and the sweat on your skin. His characters are complex but totally believable, possibly because Winton challenges your perception of them by giving you a different viewpoint later.