Tim Winton’s new novel, Juice, opens with a man and a child cautiously making their way through a lonely, apocalyptic landscape. It’s reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, except that, in this case, the child is a silent girl whose humanity is questioned, and the apocalypse is climate change. It’s a horrifyingly dystopian vision of a future that might come to pass: a world of “desert heat”, where the humans still left alive have migrated away from the “death belt” of the tropics, and now live underground for months at a time to shelter from the “liquefying” sun.
The man and girl happen upon an abandoned mine with a deep, laddered shaft leading underground. They pause cautiously at the edge, considering that they may have found a refuge, but they’re on someone else’s turf, it turns out, and the owner isn’t happy about it. Soon they’re descending the shaft, a crossbow at their backs, and being locked into a cage underground. “So, go for your life,” their captor says, settling in to hear their story. “Explain yourself.”
One fellow down a mine talking non-stop for more than 500 pages mightn’t sound like an easy sell in today’s world of endless distractions, but it’s utterly absorbing. It’s a mark of Winton’s skill that he’s able to find room for humour, too, in this dark tale, with the captor returning every so often to the narrative, saying things like, “Jesus, don’t you ever shut up?”
The narrator tells of his childhood growing up in a remote settlement, where survival is a matter of extreme self-reliance: grinding bones of dead people and animals to make soil, and sandbagging underground habitats against the monsoon floods. Fossil fuels are a relic of a bygone age, their use so unbelievable as to be practically the stuff of legend. “Grease and gas and coal was how these overlords got their power. By burning this stuff. To generate juice”. Soon the tale takes an even darker turn: to a secret life of special ops training and assassination missions around the globe, taking revenge on the people deemed responsible for the climate catastrophe.
It’s a thrilling story of survival and adventure, and a dark glimpse into our world’s possible future.
Claire Adam is author of Golden Child, winner of the Desmond Elliot Prize 2019
