Man Booker Prize 2002

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Dirt Music
Tim Winton

Dawn Cowie

A few pages into Dirt Music, we're told that Australians are riddled with a 'sentimental attachment to geography', and Western Australians, like Tim Winton, are the worst of all.

Although Winton's narrative is saturated with vibrant descriptions of the the wild beauty of his homeland, he does not idealise nature. He does ridicule the superficiality of Perth's urban dwellers and the coarseness of White Point's hicks, but he stops short of suggesting we should all go native.

The story briefly goes as follows. Georgie Jutland lives in White Point a tight-knit, 'red neck' fishing community. As an outsider from Perth's wealthy suburbs, she can marvel at how 'people could produce such a relentlessly ugly town in so gorgeous a setting'. But still she stays - why? Georgie is undoubtedly bored with Jim Buckridge, the local fishing legend she lives with. But inertia and alcoholism keep her put.

That is until she meets Luther Fox, a local poacher or 'shamateur'. Lu is tolerated because he keeps to himself, but when he starts sleeping with Jim's missus, it's time for some good ole-fashioned White Point justice. He finds his van, and his dog, peppered with bullets, and decides to seek refuge on a tropical island off the far north of the country. There he lives Robinsoe Crusoe-like until Jim and Georgie track him down.

Unfortunately, Winton's characters often seem to be either the medium through which the reader gets to experience Winton's poetic images or the vehicle that drives the plot. Too many of the them are dysfunctional and many disappointingly one-dimensional.

Everyone is carrying some dirty secret or ghost that is supposed to explain their motives. Lu's life of isolation is justified by the fact that human company inflames the memory of the night the rest of his family was killed in a car crash. Then there's Georgie's quest for some 'ennobling impulse' to give meaning to her day-to-day life. This is driven by the fear of becoming her mother: 'A compliant if distracted wife. A competent and distant mother. Feminine. Good skin, nice manners.' Finally there's Jim, who is determined to reunite Georgie and Lu because he feels he can offload some demons by doing a good deed. None of this really cuts much mustard.

But who cares when Dirt Music is such an enjoyable book to read? Winton has a caustic wit which leaves few characters unscathed, least of all the 'lawyers and surgeons and kick-arse CEOs' who enjoy their modern conveniences for 51 weeks of the year and then get their annual hit of raw emotion in one-week survival holidays living on fear and humiliation.

The otherwise slow plot also builds to a dramatic page-turning climax, and half the time Winton's prose bypasses your brain anyway, going straight for your senses. He wants the reader to hear the sea 'thick with clicks and rattles, the encrypted static of the silent world speaking', and he succeeds.