Tim Slee's Blog: How's the Serenity? - Posts Tagged "shepherd"
Review: Tim Winton 'The Shepherd's Hut'
*** Three stars
One of my starkest memories is of standing on the shores of a completely parched Lake Eyre in the Australian outback, shrubs around me flattened by the wind and blasted by salt. The lake stretched out forever, shimmering, flat and frankly, frightening.
These were the images Tim Winton's Shepherd's Hut brought back to me with an almost physical punch. To me, the landscape in this novel is the most impactful character.
Many other reviews talk about this novel being an iconic 'coming of age' story, or focus on the lessons the protagonist 'Jaxie' learns about being a man. I felt little of that, and it was a shame that in a book featuring only two characters (if you don't count the landscape!) I found neither Jaxie nor the old hermit who lives in the Shepherd's hut to be engaging figures. As usual for Winton, a lot is left to the readers' imagination and the missing back story of how the hermit, Fintan, came to be living in a hut in the middle of nowhere is typical of that. I don't find that frustrating, because I am a die hard Winton fan and used to his ways, but others might find the characters under developed because of it.
This is the first Winton novel for which I skipped swathes of text. The second third of the book is slow, with a whole lot of nothing going on except Jaxie's internal dialogue. It reads more like the diary of a teenage boy than a novel. I also tired very quickly of Winton's use of 'idiom', writing as he imagines the uneducated boy would talk. Authentic, maybe, but also rather annoying. I favor the Elmore Leonard ten commandments of writing, one of which is 'don't try to write in dialects'. In past Winton novels he has managed to capture the language of Australia without feral grammar dominating, but in this, it is unrelenting and overdone.
"And it sort of worked, our arrangement. Before I couldna seen the sense in it."
"It was two whole days before he give me a knife he had spare."
And finally, as we get to the last third of the the novel and it appears to be going nowhere (with no resolution in sight because there is in fact no story arc, just two guys in a hut in the desert shooting goats and arguing with each other) the author throws in a sudden, violent and frankly unlikely encounter with which to wind things up.
I'm a huge Winton fan and have loved everything he has written, reading all of his books at least twice and Cloud Street at least five times. Any Winton book is worth waiting for so when I award this one an average '3 stars' it is only in the context of how great his other books have been! I just can't see myself reading this one twice, or recommending it to others.
One of my starkest memories is of standing on the shores of a completely parched Lake Eyre in the Australian outback, shrubs around me flattened by the wind and blasted by salt. The lake stretched out forever, shimmering, flat and frankly, frightening.
These were the images Tim Winton's Shepherd's Hut brought back to me with an almost physical punch. To me, the landscape in this novel is the most impactful character.
Many other reviews talk about this novel being an iconic 'coming of age' story, or focus on the lessons the protagonist 'Jaxie' learns about being a man. I felt little of that, and it was a shame that in a book featuring only two characters (if you don't count the landscape!) I found neither Jaxie nor the old hermit who lives in the Shepherd's hut to be engaging figures. As usual for Winton, a lot is left to the readers' imagination and the missing back story of how the hermit, Fintan, came to be living in a hut in the middle of nowhere is typical of that. I don't find that frustrating, because I am a die hard Winton fan and used to his ways, but others might find the characters under developed because of it.
This is the first Winton novel for which I skipped swathes of text. The second third of the book is slow, with a whole lot of nothing going on except Jaxie's internal dialogue. It reads more like the diary of a teenage boy than a novel. I also tired very quickly of Winton's use of 'idiom', writing as he imagines the uneducated boy would talk. Authentic, maybe, but also rather annoying. I favor the Elmore Leonard ten commandments of writing, one of which is 'don't try to write in dialects'. In past Winton novels he has managed to capture the language of Australia without feral grammar dominating, but in this, it is unrelenting and overdone.
"And it sort of worked, our arrangement. Before I couldna seen the sense in it."
"It was two whole days before he give me a knife he had spare."
And finally, as we get to the last third of the the novel and it appears to be going nowhere (with no resolution in sight because there is in fact no story arc, just two guys in a hut in the desert shooting goats and arguing with each other) the author throws in a sudden, violent and frankly unlikely encounter with which to wind things up.
I'm a huge Winton fan and have loved everything he has written, reading all of his books at least twice and Cloud Street at least five times. Any Winton book is worth waiting for so when I award this one an average '3 stars' it is only in the context of how great his other books have been! I just can't see myself reading this one twice, or recommending it to others.
How's the Serenity?
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