Review | Book review: Tim Winton's compelling midlife memoir
The Australian writer, known for his deep connection to the environment, ruminates on a life in thrall to the beauty and power of language and landscape
by Tim Winton
Hamish Hamilton/Picador
It’s difficult to think of a memoir so appropriately titled as this unusually shaped – and unusually compelling – mid-life offering from Australian author Tim Winton.
It takes both its title and its cues from the honest, searching opening chapter, in which the author of acclaimed novels such as Eyrie (2013), Breath (2008), Cloudstreet (1991) and the Booker Prize-shortlisted Dirt Music (2001) and The Riders (1994), recalls himself as he once was: a shy and inarticulate 13-year-old who took to secretly pointing his father’s rifle at passers-by from behind the curtains of his parents’ bedroom.
“When I think of that kid at the window, the boy I once was, I get a lingering chill,” he writes, before pulling back the curtain further on that boyhood behaviour and many other incidents that shaped him as a man and a writer.
Winton homes in on that universal, age-old mystery of boyhood, the strange allure of the “gun’s slinky power”. And the way in which, in an era of mass shootings and jihadism, parents and communities have passed on the responsibility of modelling forms of masculinity to the entertainment industry, whose brutish and simplistic examples invariably suggest the gun as a solution to all problems.