Juice by Tim Winton: Review by Alexandra Pierce

Juice, Tim Winton (Picador 978-1-76134-489-3, AUD$45.00, 528pp, hc) October 2024. Cover by Adam Laszczuk.

Here’s an admission that would elicit a gasp from the Australian literary elite: I have never read a Tim Winton novel. Worse, I read the opening of one of his most famous novels and I hated it. But then I read Juice. And if all his novels hit like that for people who like realism… I finally get it. Because Juice is amazing. It’s postapocalyptic, it’s very Australian, and it manages to be simultane­ously grim, challenging, and hopeful.

The story opens with a man and a girl in a ve­hicle, travelling through a forbidding landscape. They have a water distiller and some food; the land is ashes and dust and unspeakably hot. They skirt the occasional settlement, not going too close – it’s clear they are no place to take a child. They even­tually come to an old mine, where they are taken captive by a man living there alone. The rest of the novel involves the narrator relating his life for his captor – both to show that he is no threat, and to prove that he and his captor are alike enough that they could live together harmoniously.

It’s unclear how far into the future the story is set; many generations, at least. The narrator is living long after a period of Terror, when global infrastructure fell apart and technology failed and the climate steadily worsened. There was no one moment of crisis; it was just one damn thing after another. The narrator grew up in a period of relative stability, on a largely self-sufficient homestead, situated on a peninsula of (what used to be) northwest Western Australia. It’s so hot in summer that families live underground for several months of the year, only emerging at night to ensure nothing has been destroyed by the weather. Even in winter no one works in the middle of the day, because heat sickness is a very real danger. As an adolescent, the narra­tor is recruited to the Service. He is shown the truth about what life used to be like, challenged to be someone who acts rather than someone who submits, and then trained to be an opera­tor: someone deployed across the world to track down “objects” and “acquit” them. That is, to find people whose families were responsible for the worst excesses of the Hundred Years of Light (our time, basically), and kill them. Unsurpris­ingly, this comes at a cost: His relationships with his mother and his wife both suffer from his long absences and his weak excuses; the killings themselves exact a price, both in the loss of comrades and his own psychological health. Nevertheless, he perseveres, and finally (across 500 pages) explains to his captor what brings him to this precise moment.

Alongside a fairly small selection of characters, place has an enormous role in this novel, and Win­ton uses it to evoke a very particular vision of the future. His descriptions are simultaneously bleak and captivating; the narrator’s land is a threaten­ing and dangerous place to live, but it also has its beauty. This is a story that I think could only be set in Australia. Most of Western Australia today is sparsely populated – resulting in meagre ruins for the future – and the climate is already heating up, which will surely result in both population decrease and the sort of accommodations Win­ton describes. Humans are barely scraping by, in this future: The narrator lives pretty much on the Tropic of Capricorn, and no one lives north of Capricorn or south of Cancer anymore. All of this leads to resilience, but also to tunnel vision, with most people entirely focused on survival. Add Australia’s geographical isolation to this mix, and you have ingredients that Winton uses exquisitely in his story about how humans might survive in such a world, but where thriving is a different issue.

The grim nature of Juice should be evident. The hopefulness comes from the relationship between the man and the girl, and from the fact that there are indeed humans who work together even in this bleak world. The challenge is in the way Winton pulls no punches regarding climate change. This world is a direct descendant of ours, and the fact that not enough is being done right now to miti­gate the effects of climate change. Specific corpo­rations are named as bearing responsibility, but all of us who live through the years of wastefulness are complicit. There is an air of fatalism in which the narrator’s story – what’s done is done; there’s also the sense that vengeance, through the Service, is completely appropriate. I can’t help but think the narrator would look at us, alive right now, and ask, Why didn’t you do something?

“Cli-fi” is a terrible name for an important genre. I don’t love Juice as a title, although the issue of power (with its varied meanings) is a central issue. Regardless of that quibble, this is a novel that is going to sit with me for a very, very long time: for the beauty of its language and the challenge of its message.

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This review and more like it in the January 2025 issue of Locus.

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