Dystopia? What dystopia?
Tim Winton tells me the Australia of his new novel is not a distant imagining, a construct of a remote and bleaker future. It is a story not far from the here and now.
"I'm a bit sceptical about the dystopian element because it's a way of pushing our current realities off into the future. I think it's got more than its foot in the door already," Winton says.
We are speaking on the phone the day his long-awaited new novel, Juice, is published. A novel, as Winton tells it, about a man in a hole telling a story to save his life. The Australian continent has been disfigured by climate change. People eke out their livings from a hot, unforgiving landscape. A few, stirred to action, know, and find out, it did not have to be like this.
You do not need to move the dial very far, Winton says, for the top of Australia, and the whole equatorial region, to become uninhabitable. It's beginning to happen already, he says. Just this winter, in the north of Australia, temperatures hit the 40s.
"That's why it's so frustrating to be, you know, watching the antics in Canberra, as people busily get about the business of doing very, very little about it," he says.
Winton, a four-time winner of the Miles Franklin Award and the author of more than a dozen novels, says he felt the issue of climate change might have needed a blunter approach than other writers had been taking. He had been watching other writers make oblique and "very elegant" approaches to the climate crisis, but felt he was cornered into addressing it himself.
"I was in high school in the 1970s when we were talking about the greenhouse effect. So the whole course of my conscious life, it would seem, and certainly the trajectory of my adulthood, and my sentimental education, shall we say, has been during the age of awareness - or the age of knowledge - when we knew what we were doing was having a material impact, and then it became obvious, a catastrophic impact on our planet and on the prospects of the species," he says.
"We've all been slowly boiling frogs in that sense."
Winton takes aim at the climate deniers who were in power in Canberra and talks of living through a squandered decade - or decades - when the last good years of agency drifted past, mired by inaction as the chance to mitigate the worst of the climate chaos passed. No surprise he has no time for those "waving around lumps of coal in parliament" or the "petro state" of Western Australia, his home, where the fossil fuel and resources industries have a "disproportionate impact ... over every aspect of our lives and, most dangerously, government policy".
"And so living through those years, I just thought, well, it's one thing just to feel pissed off. How do you address that imaginatively?"
The result is Juice, Winton's first novel since The Shepherd's Hut, which was published in 2018. Winton's melodious vernacular returns, his outsider characters, too. But this is a self-propelling cry against the inaction and wilful destruction of the planet.
Do we really think, Winton says, we'll be seen as heroic or do we think that we might be seen as monsters?
"Most of us know that what we're doing is enormously consequential - and it's conceivable that our names will live, as a generation and as national entities and corporations, as societies ... in infamy," he says.
"And that's an awful prospect to contemplate. But I think once that stake's driven in the ground, it is a point at which to come back and think, OK, where's my moral compass here?"
While he was writing Juice in the years of political climate ignorance, Winton became a grandparent multiple times. "Each time a kid's born, you've got more skin in the game ... you look at the little unblemished bodies, and particularly their unblemished faces, and you think, 'What's your life going to be like?'," he says.
There was a point when parents could safely assume, looking to the arc of history, their children's life would be better than theirs, with opportunities they could never imagine having access to. Winton, who finds it devastating how many young people are deciding not to be parents, says he can't honestly assume life will be better for the next generation.
"Once that dawns on you, that's a terrible emotional and moral moment," he says. "And it can be a galvanising moment, as it has been for me."
Just don't think such a moment makes it easier to write a novel. Nor do they get easier with practise.
Winton says writing a novel is a kind of volatile equation that you try to get right year after year - the prospect of every novel is as intimidating as the one before. "It is essentially self directing to a large degree. ... Yes, ultimately I'm supposed to be the adult in charge, but the work itself does a lot of the instruction, if you know what I mean," he says.
"In a way, that's kind of great and, in a way, it's a huge pain in the arse."
Each novel is a new problem. Getting to the end of each sentence is tough because it's different from the last. Winton says sometimes you don't know if it's going to work until late in the piece, or at all.
"Is this situation alive or am I just poking a corpse to make it look like it's moving? And it's very hard to know whether the thing is animated. You know, a live thing in its own right - or not," he says.
Winton has been at this a long time. He won his first Miles Franklin, for Shallows, in 1984. It was his second novel and he was just 24. "I was sort of, not just unfeasibly young, it was almost indecently young. And in retrospect, I can understand why it was so unsettling for other writers and particularly other commentators when I was setting out because I was anomalous, let's just say," he says.
"But the good thing about being that young is how unself-conscious you are, and you get stripped of that over time. You would have thought that all the education and experience would arm you for the enterprise, but it doesn't seem to stand you in that much good stead."
Then comes the "strange alchemy between a book and a readership". The business of being read is very different to the actual business of writing, Winton says.
"When Cloudstreet came out, in the midst of a recession that we had to have apparently, it was a book that I expected to sell 1500 copies and just, you know, go to God," he says.
"And it just became its own thing, separate to me, separate to anybody's predictions. I just, for the rest of my life, have to somehow absorb, or just contend, or just submit to people's various readings of it, how enchanted or enraged they were by it or whatever."
Cloudstreet - the sweeping story of two families in Perth over a two-decade span - was awarded the Miles Franklin, adapted for television, and became that rare thing: a critically-acclaimed bestseller.
Despite all that success, and the further success that followed, Winton stresses it does not get any easier writing a novel.
"Novels have to compete with so many other forms of culture or entertainment or diversion," he says.
"It's probably always been a beleaguered form. Probably before I was born, when [the novel] had its heyday, in the sort of 20th century, it really was an influential form. When you think about Upton Sinclair's The Jungle that changed the whole meat packing industry in Chicago; Steinbeck had a big impact; Hemingway, whether it was the Spanish Civil War.
"All the same, people looked to writers and novelists in a way that they probably don't now."
Art does not need an excuse to exist, it doesn't need any utility, Winton says, but it would be delusional to think art doesn't have an impact on people.
"You'd be an idiot to write a novel with a determination that you were going to change history because that would just be hubris," he says.
Winton says his money would be on the chances that a novel written with the express purpose of changing history would not be a very good novel anyway.
"There are writers who people stay with and I think it's probably a little reckless to dismiss the impact that writing, and particularly novel writing, or the writing of novels or novels themselves, can have on a culture, you know," he says. "I think that's a good thing."
Winton and I keep circling around the question of storytelling: why do we tell stories? Who gets to tell them? What do the stories we tell ourselves say about us?
Winton mentions being on archaeological digs, seeing up close how ancient the storytelling impulse is.
"To be able to see that at the source, to see the hearths of fires that are as old as human consciousness, as old as human presence not just on this continent but any continent - when you realise that Neanderthals were still in Europe when people were in the north of Australia - yeah, it's pretty mind blowing," he says.
"You realise as an older person, and as an older practitioner, that the impulse is not just ancient, but it's vital, even if art is seen as an optional extra in late modernity."
Given everything that's happening - the imminent collapse of the climate, brutal and little to give much hope this trajectory can or will be reversed - does it matter we're still telling stories to ourselves? Is a novel about a man stuck underground telling stories to survive, anything more than a futile exercise?
"These are the means by which we make sense of reality," Winton says of the stories we tell. They're a moral framework, the device we use to understand ourselves and each other.
"When we've made progress in this country in my lifetime, it's when we left certain things behind and tried other things. Change is tough, you know, and we're terrified of change. Australians like to think of themselves as brave and robust, but we're really a conformist, often fearful bunch - always looking over our shoulder to make sure that we're not sticking out too much," Winton tells me at the end of our conversation.
"But the game changers are the people who stick out and just put a stick in the spokes really and say, 'Why don't we change the story? This story's better than that one'."
