Tim Winton. Cloudstreet

It's quiet for a few moments and then they begin to sing, and once they start it's hard to give it up, so they set up a great train of songs from school and church and wireless, on and on in the dark until they're making them up and starting all over again to change the words and the speed. Quick isn't afraid, and he knows Fish is alright. He lies back with his eyes closed. The whole boat is full of their songs -- they shout them up at the sky until Fish begins to laugh. Quick stops singing. It's dead quiet and Fish is laughing like he's just found a mullet in his shorts. It's a crazy sound, a mad sound, and Quick opens his eyes to see Fish standing up in the middle of the boat with his arms out like he's gliding, like he's a bird sitting in an updraught. The sky, packed with stars, rests just above his head, and when Quick looks over the side he sees the river is full of sky as well. There's stars and swirl an space down there and it's not water anymore -- it doesn't even feel wet. Quick stabs his fingers in. There's nothing there. there's no lights ashore now. No, There's no shore at all, not that he can see. There's only sky out there, above and below, everywhere to be seen. Except for Fish's giggling, there's no sound at all. Quick knows he is dreaming. This is a dream. He feels a turd shunting against his sphincter. He's awake, alright. But it's a dream -- it has to be.
Are we in the sky, Fish?
Yes. It's the water.
What dyou mean?
The water. The water. I fly (114).

Is it the war that's done it to you?
It's all war, she said.
What is?
I don't know. Everythin. Raisin a family, keepin yer head above water. Life. War is our natural state.
Well, struggle maybe, said Lester.
No, no, it's war.
Ah, things come along. You take the good with the bad.
Oriel rears with sudden passion: No you don't. You know about boats. You can't steer if you're not going faster than the current. If you're not under your own steam then yer just debris, stuff floatin. We're not frightened animals, Lester, just waitin with some dumb thoughtless patience for the tide to turn. I'm not spendin my livin breathin life quietly takin the good with the bad. I'm not standing for the bad; bad people, bad luck, bad ways, not even bad breath. We make good, Lester. We make war on the bad and don't surrender.
Some things can't be helped.
Everything can be helped (pp. 229-30).

At dawn, and the first raw-throated stirrings of hidden birds, Cloudstreet floats soundlessly from the gloom to join the day. Down on the tracks a Fremantle freight creeps past under a limestone sky, and in her tent, towelling the water from her face and chest in a manner so delicate as to be secretive, and to someone who knew her, completely uncharacteristic, Oriel Lamb feels the vibrations in the duckboards. When she's finished washing she applies a little talcum powder and dresses in her floral frock, stockings and hardsoled sandals which look more like work boots with ventilators cut into them. She notes again the ugliness of her feet all distorted with corns and bunions. She still remembers her own bare running feet on the dirt of the home paddock when the world was a place given by God for the pleasures of children, when all that was good was unbroken (p. 251).

No. No. I'll stay a cop. But it's not us and them anymore. It's us and us and us. It's always us. That's what they never tell you. Geez, Rose, I just want to do right. But there's no monsters, only people like us. Funny, but it hurts (Tim Winton. Cloudstreet. Simon & Schuster / Scribner Paperback, 1991, p. 402).

(It's a rare novelist I can bear reading these days, which I intend as a comment on my (dis)abilities as a reader rather than on the novels themselves. But in too many, the details seem inconsequential, the prose style plodding or predictable, the characters as aimless as the plot itself. So it was a real pleasure this Christmas break to read Tim Winton's Dirt Music, which is about something like love and hope, rooted in the broken, unfamiliar soil of Western Australia. And then from there to Winton's magnum opus, Cloudstreet, a great, sprawling novel, a cross between Dickens and Faulkner -- the tale of two over-sized families, the Pickles and the Lambs, tripping over one another in an equally over-sized mansion in Perth during WWII and then in the 50's and 60's. It's hard to say what makes this novel so great -- in part, its elegance and eloquence; in part, its quirky humor (including a talking pig and an addled young man named Fish who appears to glow at times); in part, its love of its extraordinary cast of characters, not despite but because of their gloomy passions, quirks, and obsessions; and in part for its faith and resilience. Among many things, Tim Winton's in love with music, and the lilt and thump and beat and rhythm of instruments and songs make these broken lives whole. I really loved this novel. It was one of those rare books that, once finished, sends you back to the beginning, half because you can't bear to let it go, and half because you want to find out what else the author has written, because you can't let him (or her) go either.)