A superb tale of disillusionment and redemption, loss and beauty, this is Winton in top form
Tom Keely is divorced, unemployed and disgraced. His life has imploded. After years as a high-powered environmental activist he's now holed up in the book's titular eyrie, a bolthole in the seedy Mirador apartments, a Fremantle highrise for the down-at-heel and down-on-their-luck.
But the universe outside Keely's flat is persistent: his mother Doris and sister Faith are worried about him, determined to drag him back into the world. Keely's desire to hide away and his instinctive need to right wrongs are also about to come into sharp opposition.
Several interviews with Tim Winton on the release of his new novel, Eyrie, have spent time dwelling on the book's title and in particular an anxiety about how to pronounce it. Winton approaches the question with his customary equanimity: people will, he knows, read the title in their own ways. That is, after all, the point. He favours Eyrie to rhyme with "airy": enjoying the connotations of openness, the echoes of wide spaces, the Australianness of the drawled opening vowel.
This blend of thoughtfulness, willingness to embrace ambiguity and clarity of purpose are characteristic of Winton and his work. The author of 25 books for adults and children, four-time Miles Franklin Award winner and the embodiment of that rarest of things, a commercially successful literary writer, the publication of a new Tim Winton novel is met with excitement and baggage in equal measures. Excitement, because Winton is one of our finest writers. Baggage, because of the weight of expectations and preconceived notions about what a Winton novel looks like.
Much, for example, has already been made of the bleakness of Winton's new novel, but this strikes me as a limited reading of Eyrie. The book contains moments of real fury and desolation, and certainly doesn't offer any easy comfort or sentimentality, but the notion that literary achievement should only be measured by its grittiness doesn't do justice to the other achievements of this novel. One might just as readily point to its page-turning qualities – the narrative is as propulsive as anything he has written before – or applaud the novel's caustic and frequently laugh-out-loud sense of humour. In Tom Keely, Winton has created a narrator whose misfortune and fury is matched by a merciless and mordant wit, and Winton has rarely been funnier.
But it is, at its heart, a novel about characters trying to work out how to be good to one another. Throughout Winton's oeuvre he's told stories of lost souls and lost faith, casting his characters adrift and searching; searching for lost loved ones or improbable romance, for a way they might make their way in the world and for something to believe in. Eyrie is the latest iteration of this story, and it's a cracker.
As the book opens Keely is nursing what might be the most vividly described hangover in Australian literature. Squinting through Fremantle sun, raging against everything in his path, Keely is fallen not because he has compromised the things he stands for but because he would not. "In both marriage and work he'd become more angry than effective, more impatient than observant and more honest than useful."
Keely's sense of failure is heightened by his desire to measure up to the memory of his father Nev, a giant of a man and a champion "for the little bloke, the reject, the no-hoper". The Keelys are clearly a family in the rescuing business: Doris (one of Winton's most beautifully realised characters to date) is a social worker turned lawyer; Faith is busy trying to rescue the global financial markets. Keely's assessment of his own achievements and virtues is sceptical at best: "righteous in a misanthropic way", but it's clear that for him, escaping his downward spiral will rely on finding a cause to believe in.
Enter Gemma Buck, one of the dimly remembered strays from Keely's childhood. Gemma – beaten down by life in a way that makes Keely's own travails seem indulgent – is living two doors along from him with her six-year-old grandson, Kai.
Kai is a singular and peculiar child, watchful and troubled, much given to proclamations about dead birds and imminent extinction. A pervasive sense of doom hangs over him and he quickly identifies in Keely the possibility of a champion: "I knew you," said Kai one night. "I knew you before you had a face."
For Keely, searching for a way to fill his own "father-shaped-hole", such need is irresistible. With the arrival of the damaged woman and the anxious little boy in his life, Keely once again has a sense of purpose and a reason to engage with world. As he puts it memorably: "It made a man feel enormous and substantial. That he might be necessary." But Keely's fitness for the task of saving anyone is questionable.
In what has been a wonderful year for Australian fiction, Eyrie is a superb novel: a novel of disillusionment and redemption, loss and beauty, the taking of responsibility and the overcoming of disappointment.
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