Winton’s latest boy’s own adventure
At the heart of the wellwritten The Shepherd’s Hut is the archetype of an older man handing on experience to a boy with a troubled past, Nicholas Reid.
Huckleberry Finn escaped an abusive, drunken father, lit out on the Mississippi River, and learnt some adult wisdom from the slave Jim.
Jaxie Clackton escapes an abusive, drunken father, lights out in the badlands of West Australia, and learns something like adult wisdom from a fugitive priest living in a shepherd’s hut.
No, I’m not suggesting that that’s all there is to the latest novel by the prolific Australian Tim Winton. But I am saying that an archetype is at the heart of The Shepherd’s Hut. It’s the archetype of an older man handing on experience to a raw kid.
To be specific, not only has 15-yearold Jaxie been beaten repeatedly by his no-hoper father, but he’s lost his much-abused mum to cancer and been forcibly separated from his girlfriend (and cousin) Lee, the only person for whom he has a tender regard.
When his dad dies in a stupid accident, Jaxie fears he will be accused of killing him. After all, his wild barneys with his father are well known to everyone in their tiny, dead-end town. So with rifle, knife and pack, he sneaks off north on foot. At least his dad taught him how to track, shoot, and skin ‘roos and goannas.
The whole flavour of this novel is in the narration, because it is Jaxie who tells his own story. His language is crude, violent, angry, vivid and oddly poetic, even when he’s effing and blinding. The kid has a sharp, instinctive intelligence and a few tonnes of scepticism about the things adults say, because his experience of adults has mainly been appalling. He has the tracking ability of a good bushman and the skills of a survivor. But he’s also a kid and sometimes thinks he knows more than he does.
The best of this is the way it dramatises the Australian outback landscape – those vast, arid wastes and salt lakes and tiny stands of trees under the burning sun and empty shacks with rusted corrugated-iron roofs and abandoned mine workings surrounded by barbed wire and broken bottles. It often brings to mind something like the iconic paintings of Oz’s greatest artist Sidney Nolan.
There is a downside to it, however. Much that the priest says is the reasonable mentoring an older man can give a kid. But some of his wisdom comes into the category of vague mystic fuzz and is maybe not all that wise. You will have to make up your own mind about the heavy symbolic use made of the sun and the moon and the standing rocks and the shimmering salt lake. The novel’s violent ending is a bit pat and depends in part on young Jaxie having improbably acute perception.
All in all, though, this is a memorable and very readable novel. Sure, it implies much about male mentalities and the current ‘‘crisis of masculinity’’. But I suspect most readers will enjoy it for what it most essentially is – a well-written adventure story.