Review | Tim Winton’s harrowing novel The Shepherd’s Hut: poetic, profane and powerful
A story of gore, horror and hope from the master of landscapes, solitude and self reflection
The Shepherd’s Hut
by Tim Winton
Hamish Hamilton
The Shepherd’s Hut, by Australian writer Tim Winton, is a hymn to hard-won hope.
It is also a novel that rejects convention and complacency from the opening, with the words of its teenage narrator: “When I hit the bitumen and get that smooth gray rumble going under me everything’s hell different. You’d think I’d never got in a car before. But when you’ve hoofed it like a dirty goat all these weeks and months, when you’ve had the stony, slow prickle-up hard country in your face that long it’s bloody sudden. Some crazy shit, I tell you. Brings on this angel feeling. Like you’re just one arrow of light.”
Jackson “Jaxie” Clackton, a 15-year-old boy on the run, soon brings the reader into the turmoil of his troubled life, and directly into the turbo-charged engine of this harrowing, mesmerising novel.
Winton is, of course, a novelist par excellence. With no fewer than 29 books to his credit, along with two Man Booker shortlistings and four Miles Franklin Awards, he is acclaimed both in his homeland and internationally for such masterpieces as Cloudstreet (1991), Eyrie (2013), Breath (2008), Dirt Music (2001) and The Riders (1994).