Its a long time since I read Australian fiction and I am just through with a very well known work, Cloudstreet. Tim Winton's book is a chronicle of Australian working class life, most of it set in post war Perth. Its account of two families (the aptly and amusingly named Lambs and Pickleses) who share a house (the eponymous Cloudstreet), is somehow simultaneously a generation spanning linear novel and a poetic, fragmented account of a particular kind of Australian life. Poetic in spite of employing throughout the direct and salty form of speech favoured by most Australians. The book plunges you into all the features of post war Australian life - a rural upbringing, migration to suburbia, gambling, prudence, strong family bonds, fire, water - and its main characters all ring true. Winton also alludes to the themes of the day like the wars and its impact on Australian life, the Menzies years, the work life of the city, the Nedlands monster et al without losing his focus on the two families. The book is also very successful in evoking that other motif of Australian fiction, the landscape. He makes Perth and its environs come alive till you can smell and feel the West Australian world the families inhabit. And he is exceptionally successful in evoking watery landscapes, fitting given the role it plays throughout the novel, especially in the life of Fish Lamb, the slow boy who partially narrates the story. Winton also has deeper themes going on, Cloudstreet with its ghosts of a white lady and black girl past and its recurrence sense of evil, for example could stand in for a nation where black and white history has been divisive. Cloudstreet is eventually rid of the ghosts - Winton uses the consummation of Rose Pickles and Quick Lamb's relationship to signal this, presumably a new generation literally banishing ghosts past. While most of the characters are working class or of the land, there are two exceptions. With both, Winton falters. One is Toby Raven with whom Rose Pickles has a brief relationship. He is middle class (or upper middle class), clever and college educated with smart friends with a taste for the different (literally given the Italian establishment he and his friends frequent) and a journalist. His role in the book is clearly to act as a counterpoint to the Lambs and Pickleses. Rose is an outsider to this world and he serves as a catalyst for her flight back to Cloudstreet and into Quick Lamb's arms. However, Winton makes him so much of a poser that he becomes a caricature, almost as if the author had a few axes to grind with the Australian literary establishment. The choosing of a journalist figure and someone who denotes a life of the mind as an object of ridicule also rather sadly reinforces the anti-intellectual strain of Australian life. All the more surprising given that this novel is not cast in the populist mode. The aboriginal figures in the novel on the other hand are distant, almost other worldy, and here Winton falls into the trap of black fella spiritualism. Both Lambs and Pickleses "see" them but they are not real figures and even though Winton's language itself does not falter, the reader is left with the idea that they only serve as mystical clap trap. In fact the only reference to a real aboriginal person is the native girl, part of the stolen generation, whose ghost inhabits Cloudstreet. As a result the working class are given direction and are allowed to experience epiphanies by the people who once inhabited the land but there is no allusion to the racism that one can reasonably expect to have been present in at least some working class families in post war Australia. Nevertheless these are minor quibbles about a book I really liked and I hope to read more of Winton's work.
