Review by New York Times Review
TEN FLOORS UP in a seedy apartment building on the edge of a city on the edge of a dry continent and a vast ocean, Tim Winton's antihero teeters on the brink of destitution and despair. In the wake of several storms that have engulfed his life, he's been left stranded, a fish flapping uselessly on the sand. Set, as so many of Winton's books are, in Western Australia - "which was, you could say, like Texas. Only it was big" - his new novel, "Eyrie," is a dark but dazzling study of people and places on the edge. These marginal zones are where Winton enjoys spending time, scavenging for driftwood, floats, rope, old sea boots - and characters like Tom Keely, a washed-up environmentalist who's been unceremoniously ejected from the world of idealism and activism. A writer is like a beachcomber, Winton observed in a 1993 memoir, who "picks over the tide line, over the bits and pieces of people's lives with grim fascination." "In dark moments I believe that walking on a beach at low tide is to be looking for death, or at least anticipating it. You will only find the dead, the spilled and the castoff. Things torn free of their life or their place." Tom Keely is barely clinging to his life and place. He's drinking too much, taking pills, falling over in supermarket aisles, passing out. Winton offers only glimpses of what left Keely marooned: a broken marriage followed by career suicide in the form of some defamatory truth-telling while campaigning to save an endangered species of cockatoo. These are pivotal events, to be sure, but Winton is much more interested in their aftermath - in what's left behind, and whether there's a way back from the brink. On that score, things aren't looking too good. Some days, like the one on which the novel opens, Keely can't even make it the few hundred yards from his apartment to a favorite cafe. Getting through the torrents of people, the payday gauntlet of buskers, winos, "charity-tin rattlers," filthy "footpath jewelers" and drunken Irish backpackers is beyond him. If only he'd set out earlier, but now "it was witching hour on the Strip" - late morning, when the "yummy mummies" run in packs, "with their hulking all-terrain strollers," descending on the neighborhood "to circle their wagons and colonize entire cafes for cistern-sized lattes and teeny-cutesy babycinos." The picture Winton draws in these opening pages, of self-pity amid modern middle-class excess and decay, is mordantly wonderful. A beaten Tom Keely is retreating home when, to his dismay, a woman and child join him in the elevator. Not only do they ride all the way up to his floor, but the woman seems to know who he is. "Tommy Keely, she said. He blinked. It was nasty, hearing his name uttered. Here in the building. Out in the open." She is Gemma Buck, a neighbor girl from his childhood home in Blackboy - since renamed Grasstree - Crescent. "Keely thought of the hundred nights the Buck girls came knocking: summer evenings out there on the porch sobbing in their nylon nighties, the sound of glass breaking up the hill behind them. There was always screaming; their place was bedlam after dark." When that happened, Keely's father, Nev, would head up to the Buck house and deal with the abusive Johnny Buck while the girls huddled against Keely's mother, "mewling like pups." And so things fold back on themselves. Now it's broken-down Tom Keely who is called to put on Nev's mantle and protect Gemma, along with her 6-year-old grandson, Kai, from a new generation of violence - a father on parole and a mother (Gemma's daughter) who's serving prison time for "drugs, assault and thieving." And yet Tom isn't Nev, a good man "but not always smart," who worked at saving souls until the mainstream churches rejected him for his jeans, work shirt and concern for the "little bloke, the reject, the no-hoper." Nev moved on to a Christian biker gang - "Harley-riding holy rollers" - who turned out to be racists and wore down "Revvin Nev" in a court case that took most of the family money and all of Nev's strength. "Soon afterwards the heart attack carted him off. And they were alone, his mother, his sister and him, in debt, bewildered." Nev's premature death left Keely with a "father-shaped hole" that provides at least some of the fuel for his omnipresent hopelessness. "How could you measure up? There was no longer any grand striding towards justice and equality. In this new managerial dispensation, change was incremental or purely notional. Big gestures were extinct. Even on YouTube messianic figures arose and evaporated in hours. And yet he knew his father was not just a man of his time. For all his own triumphs as an activist, the forest coupes spared, the spills exposed and species protected, there'd be no one talking about Tom Keely in 30 years." Keely might not be one of those "solitary men in squatters' shacks" that Winton remembered encountering on camping trips he took as a teenager, but he's getting perilously close. Winton also flirted with isolation, imagining a life for himself on some wild beach - until he realized those men were exiles, not hermits. "They had stayed too long in their shacks or at some place in their memories, and everyone had forgotten them," he wrote in his memoir. "Their own forgetting had left them with nothing to go on with." So what to do in a post-hope world, a world where neither solitude nor the sea can sustain you? And what is there left for Keely - or us - to try to save? The death of God has come and gone, and Earth is next up. Despite 15 years of struggle, Keely has barely made a dent in the destruction - "the industrial momentum was feverish. Oil, gas, iron, gold, lead, bauxite and nickel. . . . There was pentecostal ecstasy in the air, and to resist it was heresy." A tidy resolution would have Keely find redemption in rescuing Gemma and Kai, but, as his mother warns him, "to save a drowner you need to be a swimmer." Keely has the best of intentions, when he has them. It's just that some days, "he struggled to even form an intention." His is a familiar plight in the literature of despair, but it's one that Winton has made over anew for this time and place. And in his hands, with his distinctive Australian voice and vernacular, this disquieting story also has the power to surprise and delight - perhaps even inspire. "Wasn't it hot, hurting conviction that had fueled you all those good years?" Keely wonders, trying to will himself into action. "Didn't you have some warrior in you then, when things were only as hopeless as they'd ever been, when despite that you still went at it like a good and faithful servant? With only your backbone to lean on. And the pride of still giving a damn." A washed-up environmentalist has been ejected from the world of idealism. ALISON McCULLOCH, a former editor at the Book Review, is an author and journalist living in New Zealand.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 20, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Thomas Keely, an outspoken environmental activist whose career has flamed out in spectacular fashion, now spends his days in a drug- and alcohol-infused daze in a downtrodden high-rise overlooking Fremantle, a grubby Australian harbor. Improbably, an old childhood friend and her six-year-old grandson live just down the hall, and it is this unlikely reconnection with the physically and emotionally damaged Gemma and Kai that brings Keely out of his self-destructive stupor. Gemma's daughter is in prison, and the boy's meth-head father blackmails Gemma for money she doesn't have, threatening to harm his preternaturally sensitive and reclusive son. Summoning a physical, emotional, and moral courage he thought had forsaken him, Keely goes to grueling lengths to protect both woman and child from any further harm. Winton reveals Keely's, Gemma's, and Kai's backstories with tantalizing languor, doling out one dolorous detail at a time and filling the gaps with scenes of soaring insight and sharp satire. Acclaimed Australian Winton (The Turning, 2005) is underappreciated by American readers, but his latest should find its way to fans of T. C. Boyle and Jonathan Franzen.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Tom Keely, the 40-something central figure in Winton's (Breath) beautifully written powerful ninth novel, is in the throes of a midlife crisis: once a well-known environmental activist, now he's a "middle-class casualty," sacked from his job and self-destructing, while the world crumbles around him . The setting is Freemantle, a port city near Perth, Australia ("Freo" in Aussie slang), Keely's hometown. Freo, and Australia as a whole, are case studies in how greed and corruption at the government level, and crime and drug dealing at the community level, can tear the fabric of the a town. Keely finds a measure of salvation in Gemma Buck, a childhood friend now stocking shelves in a supermarket and taking care of her grandson Kai. The preternaturally innocent six-year-old boy brings Keely back from the brink, and the trio form an unlikely (but laudable) family. Winton slowly reveals Keely's backstory, but what intrigues is the main storyline-Keely's journey, with Gemma and Kai, through Freo's lower-class underbelly-as well as the prose. He's an absurdly good writer, with not only the proverbial eye for detail but also a facility for rendering each detail in an original way. Winton is ambitious; this is a state-of-the-nation novel about a world run amok. Keely is argumentative, but the book as a whole is not. Winton's use of Australian vernacular will be a challenge to many American readers, but it will be a challenge well worth taking: this is a fascinating, thought-provoking book. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Novels that start with intricately detailed descriptions of really bad hangovers are not the most enjoyable. But can precise control over language make up for an intimate look at the narrator's prescription drug problem? Divorced, publicly humiliated, and unemployable, Tom Keely, ex-spokesperson for environmental NGOs in Australia, is a loser. A real, "why would I want to spend time with you?" loser. And yet this latest novel from Winton (Dirt Music) is as addicting as the aforementioned drug addiction. A chance encounter reconnects Keely with childhood friend Gemma and her grandson, Kai. The two are in desperate straits, and Keely tries to save them and himself in the process. VERDICT The novel's suspense provides forward momentum, but the relationship between Keely and Kai binds the story. Many readers will find the early chapters unpleasant, but they should persevere. The pacing, characters, and the plot come together making this a good choice for readers of dark and emotionally difficult literature. [See Prepub Alert, 12/16/13.]-Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An odd troika stumbles through the decadence of a world on the verge of collapse in Winton's (Breath, 2008, etc.) resonant, oddly cheerful yarn.Tom Keely is a mess. A one-time environmental activist, he's failed at that, and spectacularly. He's failed at marriage, at fatherhood. Now, living high up in a seedy apartment tower on the farthest edge of western Australia, he has recurrent fears of falling out the window and off the face of the Earthsmall wonder, given his staggering chemical diet. Winton's narrative opens with a king-hell hangover, Keely lying as still as he can in the growing heat of morning, contemplating a stain on the rug: "He had no idea what it was or how it got there. But the sight of it put the wind right up him." Things don't promise to get much better for him in that hellish tower among the "stench of strangers" until, hitherto oblivious, he discovers that a neighbor is someone he vaguely knew in his younger days, way back when things were good and promised to get better. As with Tom, the years have not been kind to Gemma Buck, once quietly attractive, now guardian to her grandson, a spooky little kid given to apocalyptic visions and to saying things such as "The birds in the world will die....All of them, the birds. They die." If young Kai's dreams are haunted by extinction and doom, he's got cause: Mom's a jailbird, dad's a thug, and they're hitting Gemma up hard for money she doesn't have. Dyspeptic in a way that would please a David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury, Tom unsteadily tries to help, finally given a mission to fill his idle, meaningless days. But is he Kai's rescuer, or is Kai his? Sometimes brooding, always superbly well-written, Winton's story studies familyeven a family that is as postmodern and anti-nuclear as our hapless trioboth as anchor to keep the ship from drifting away and anchor to keep whomever it's tied to submerged.Another exquisite portrait of troubled modern life from Winton, who solidifies his reputation as one of the best writers at work in Australiaand, indeed, in Englishtoday. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
