Juice by Tim Winton is a a dystopian cli-fi novel.[1] It is set in a stark, climate-ravaged future Australia. The story begins with an unnamed man and a young, silent girl traversing a desolate landscape in a scavenger rig. Their search for refuge leads them to an abandoned mine, where they are captured at crossbow point by a solitary, wary survivor.
Like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, the narrator begins to recount his life story to his captor in an effort to survive. His story reveals a childhood spent in a community on the north coast forced to live increasingly underground to escape the heat of the sun. He describes a world where the consequences of past environmental destruction are a brutal daily reality. This is epitomised in the story about the orange:
She took the orange and pulled out her clasp knife. She set the fruit on its axis and passed the blade around the rind. Not quite at the middle, but a third of the way down. She turned it until the cut met itself. Then she set the knife a little lower and repeated the procedure. When she was finished, a curl of pithy rind came away and a whole band around the middle of the orange was naked.
Source: Juice by Tim Winton
She put the fruit in my hand.
That’s how the world is, she said.
I don’t get it.
Leave it here, on the bench. Come back tomorrow and look at it. And the day after that. That’s the world, how it is. Most people know this. But not many understand why.
So, what’s the answer?
That’s for another time. Geography before history.
Why can’t you say?
Everything in its time and season.
Talk like this unsettled me, but I was an obedient son. I left the orange where it was. Next morning, and several days thereafter, I returned to it and saw how the wounded orange scoured and struggled to heal itself.
Whenever my mother saw me examining it, her expression was impassive. On the third day, as she passed, she picked up the orange and dug the ragged nail of her index finger into the very centre of the sphere.
What’s this part? Of the world, not the orange.
The equator, I said.
Correct.
Then she set her thumb against the lower band of skin.
See this? This is us. Just north of —
Capricorn, I said.
Yes, the Tropic of Capricorn. But all this, she said, fingering the dry band that ran around the middle, people used to live there – millions and millions of them. But not anymore. Only here. And here. Where there’s still skin. North of Cancer, south of Capricorn.
That’s where people are?
That’s how the world is.
As he grows, the narrator is drawn into a clandestine organisation known as the Service. This group is dedicated to hunting down the descendants of those they hold responsible for the global environmental collapse. The bulk of the narrative follows the narrator’s dangerous double life as an operative for the Service, carrying out violent missions while trying to maintain a semblance of normal family life with his mother, wife and daughter.
Juice feels like a departure from Winton’s usual fiction. I have read a few Tim Winton books over the years, including Cloudsteet, Blueback and Dirt Music. Whether it be the sparse landscape, the ever present ocean and contrast between city and country, each novel in their own way is clearly set in Western Australia.[2] Although exploring a Sydney which is surrounded by a wall, the Republic of Utah, the Arctic swamp and the Persian Gulf, Juice too is still predominantly set in Western Australia, however 200 years or so in the future. This is an uncanny landscape that has been ravaged by climate change.[3] Although weather has a place in other novels, in Juice the impact is turned up to 11. There are glimpses of the past in the pages, but gone are the animals, people and habitat. Even the coral has even been mined to support farming. With all this said, Juice is still a coming-of-age novel, so not everything is different.
As a story, for me it sits somewhere in-between Cormac McCarthy’s spare description of a ruined world presented in The Road and Kim Stanley Robinson’s exploration of people’s response to the climate crisis in The Ministry for the Future. Unlike McCarthy’s world, which feels like there has been a particular event (or maybe that was just the film influencing me), Juice makes clear that the situation is in response to the climate. While The Service reminded me of Robinson’s terrorist group Children of Kali, who grew out of a devastating heatwave in India that killed millions.
The novel serves as something of a call to arms. However, unlike Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, it is not necessarily clear what the particular call is. It feels like it is less about preaching and more about asking questions and living with the ambiguity.
He has written this book to make people think about the trajectory that the world is on and the interests that are driving us down that road, but not necessarily what they can do about it. Because it is likely that even Winton would agree that while the response he imagines in Juice – taking violent revenge on those responsible for the state we are in – may be one some readers might wish for, it is not one they can really do anything with.
Source: Tim Winton Juice Reviewed by Robert Goodman
In some ways Juice is also a novel hope. This hope isn’t a naïve optimism for a perfect future. Instead, it’s more grounded in the enduring capacity for human connection, resilience, and the potential for moral courage even in the face of despair.
The ‘juice’ of the title is thus presented not only as a colloquial term for the energy produced by oil companies – the companies had ‘every sort of juice. The stuff that drove engines, trade, empire’ – but also the energy that drives the hero’s motivation and resilience, his ‘moral courage’, as the author described it in a recent interview. ‘It takes a lot of juice to perform,’ his fictional counterpart observes.
Source: Paul Giles reviews ‘Juice’ by Tim Winton
This hope actually extends beyond ‘humans’ to the accommodate androids as a means of survival.
Overall, Juice is an important read. As with so much of Winton’s writing, it provides a means of wondering and imagining.[4] In the case of Juice, this is wondering and imagining about the possible future we are entering.
The great mystery of people lies in the many ways in which they’ll deceive themselves.
Source: Juice by Tim Winton
All people?
All the ones I’ve known. Everything you read in the sagas.
Even now?
Especially now. Like I said, there are lots of things we don’t know. Stuff that’s obscure. Even hidden from us. But there’s plenty we prefer not to know. Things we don’t dare remember. Sometimes that’s a mercy. Other times it’s a form of servitude.
Side note: I listened to David Field’s reading of the text. Although, I could not shake my memory of ’hungry thirty’ throughout.
- “Tim Winton is far from the first author to write post-climate-change fiction. For those coming to this from the science fiction side, the world-building is a bit lacking. The narrator’s mission never really makes a lot of sense. Better examples, for those interested in the genre, are Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, Claire North’s Notes from the Burning Age, and Clare Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus.” Source: Tim Winton Juice Reviewed by Robert Goodman ↩
- It sometimes feels like Winton is almost sponsored by the Western Australian government? ↩
- It would be interesting to have a book set 200 years in the past, when the British first colonised? ↩
- “In a 2013 interview, Winton remarked that ‘fiction isn’t a means of persuasion. Fiction doesn’t have answers. It’s a means of wondering, of imagining.’ Although the way it envisages climate catastrophe is thought-provoking, it is ultimately this creative projection of ‘wondering’ and uncertainty that makes Juice a profound as well as an enthralling novel.” Source: Paul Giles reviews ‘Juice’ by Tim Winton ↩
REVIEW: Juice (Tim Winton) by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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