Winton wraps up his tale with some heightened tension and visceral thrills. Far more gripping, though, is Jaxie’s full-bodied narrative voice, which is the driving force of the novel.
Tim Winton’s new novel hovers between a profane confession and a plea for help. A distinctly Down Under story by this most Australian writer, The Shepherd’s Hut is almost too painful to read, but also too plaintive to put down ... If too many contemporary novels strike you as effete and suburban, here’s survivalist fiction at its rawest from a novelist who sometimes sounds as bleak as our own Cormac McCarthy.
Winton thrusts the reader into the barren and unforgiving salt land in western Australia. With the author’s intimate knowledge of the harsh landscape, it serves as the catalyst for action. Jaxie’s distinctive, gritty language renders his story visceral, and an absolute thrill to read.
Its narrator Jaxie Clackton is a down-under descendant of Huckleberry Finn...Jaxie’s narrative is pungently laced with earthy obscenities and sexual frankness that Twain could never have published, but it has the same mix of toughness and delicacy as Huck’s, the same combination of survival know-how and adolescent awkwardness ... a finely nuanced picture of a damaged yet not defeated youngster nearing adulthood, along with sizzlingly rendered vistas of Western Australia, that this tour-de-force novel exerts its masterly grip.
A most enviable writer, both lauded and bestselling, Winton has a particular gift for making the vernacular lyrical ... for all its lyricism, the greatest virtue of Winton’s writing is its rawness ... Faith is a quintessential Winton subject, so a fallen priest in the wilderness is his perfect character, bringing in the big themes: salvation, the greater good and the spirit beyond the self ... elegiac, transcendent ... in this remoteness all manner of ugliness can conceal itself—and the worst of it is human.
A sense of place dominates The Shepherd’s Hut. The narrative is full of vernacular names for fauna, mystifying to outsiders (salmon gums, jarrahs). Yet Winton’s descriptive energy makes its topography seem not exotic and other, but vividly present ... The novel builds suspense like a thriller, or more precisely an Australian western. The blurring of boundaries between genre and literary fiction here is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. So is the interweaving of redemptive Christian imagery into often violent scenes of action ... Winton’s intense, earthy writing style encourages us to read the novel as a work of realism. But to do so reveals implausibilities of plotting and characterization. It is better treated as a work of myth, a parable of the rites of passage from boyhood to manhood conducted in the implacable hinterland of the Australian interior, populated by Ulysses-style castaways and one-eyed monsters like the Cyclops ... his equivalent of land art.
Winton’s novel is alive with pain and suffering, but it is also full of moments of grace and small acts of kindness ... [a] mournful and fast-paced journey.
