Searching for peace in a violent wilderness
Orphan boy’s voice propels Australian writer’s latest novel
When 15-year-old Jackson Clackton finds his father dead in the opening pages of Australian writer Tim Winton’s new novel, The Shepherd’s Hut, he can’t believe his eyes. He’s spent the past several hours hiding, “nursing me bung eye and hating on Old Wankbag” in the wake of yet another beating, praying that God “do the righty for a change” and kill his father. “Because all a person wants is feeling safe. Peace, that’s all I’m after.”
Finding his father crushed under the car he was working on — “the bare hubs were down hard on the concrete” — doesn’t bring him any peace, though. Jaxie, whose mother died years earlier, knows no one will believe he didn’t kill his father. Everyone in town turned a blind eye to the Old Wankbag’s abuses (the police captain was his drinking buddy), and Jaxie has a reputation for violence himself. Jaxie has no choice but to flee, packing a few items (including a rifle) and heading north, into the gold fields and salt lakes, the barren Australian wilderness. He needs to get to Magnet, “300 kays” away, where his cousin Lee lives. She’ll believe him. She’ll save him. But first he has to save himself. The first third of the novel, which follows Jaxie as he struggles to stay alive, is enthralling storytelling. Winton, who is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, makes Jaxie’s isolation compelling: there may not be dialogue, or character interactions, but Jaxie’s voice propels the story, and is revealing as he shifts between his present circumstances and his past. We get a sense of the torment he has survived, but we also see the toll it has taken: Jaxie is deeply troubled, violent and prone to overreaction. These are reactions, defences, but they’ve become so ingrained it’s unclear whether Jaxie can ever recover. We see he can love (yes, his cousin Lee; yes, it’s complicated), but the hate pours off him.
Jaxie is put to the test when he stumbles across a shepherd’s hut, home to Fintan MacGillis, a lapsed Irish priest being kept in a permanent exile. Despite initial wariness, Jaxie is drawn into a sense of fragile community and commu- nion, a hint of the peace he has been seeking. He knows, though, that it can’t last.
The Shepherd’s Hut is a thrilling and thought-provoking novel, rooted in both the internal and physical worlds, in the perils of the present and the weight of history, in questions of identity, faith and nature. While it is at times shockingly violent and frequently ugly, it also contains, at its heart, a sense of hope, of grace.