I’ve never been to Australia but I have the feeling that if someone was to drop me somewhere north of Perth I’d have a pretty good idea where I was, thanks to Tim Winton. Here the bitumen roads, the salt lakes, the searing sun, the dirt, the bush, the kangaroos, the salmon gum trees, are all so real you can feel them, smell them, taste them. In all his books, Winton’s descriptions of Western Australia, his cherished homeland, are incredibly powerful and evocative. It’s something that Winton has in common with Cormac McCarthy (a writer with whom I think he shares a sensibility, that innate knowledge of people’s souls and hearts), the notion that where the action takes place is as important as what happens, the two feeding each other and creating the environment of the novel. The third main character in this relatively short novel ( the hardback edition comes in at 265 pages and I’d guess it’s probably a little under 80,000 words) is the landscape itself. You can feel the urgency with which Jaxie screams onto every page, desperate to be heard. I once heard Winton say that he wrote this while working on something else because Jaxie’s voice came to him and wouldn’t let go, and that’s evident throughout. What carries this story at breakneck speed is the voice, told in first person, and man, what a voice.

And given that we learn early on that Jaxie’s beloved mother is dead and his private name for his father is Captain Wankbag, it’s a fair guess that his life is already pretty lousy before we’ve even turned a page. It takes the whole novel to reveal the full extent of what the something is.

The story opens at full tilt, with Jaxie racing away from something in a stolen car. Never was this truer–or more appropriate, given the lack of characters for the vast majority of the novel–than with The Shepherd’s Hut, which tells the story of an unlikely hero, teenage Jaxie Clackton, and his encounter with a defrocked Irish priest in the middle of barren Western Australia. From poor Lester Lamb in Winton’s best-known work, Cloudstreet, forever seeking to atone for the accident that damaged his son, Fish to the enigmatic, haunted Luther Fox in Dirt Music, desperately trying to find a way to let go of all that he is and just be, Winton’s characters are rarely one-dimensional or simplistic. Tim Winton’s stories mine a deeper seam and play around with the notion of why people do the things they do. Some writers tell tales of what people do.

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