A Job Lot

Any novelist prepared to name one of his characters ‘Fish Lamb’ and to have that character come back from the dead is obviously interested in Christianity on some level. It is also true that several of the big themes that run through Tim Winton ‘s fiction – guilt atonement, forgiveness – have a religious flavour. Nevertheless, Winton’s symbolism tends to have an open-ended quality. When his characters experience moments of spiritual awareness, moments that Winton has said are meant to be taken literally, these experiences are often depicted as a nonspecific form of mysticism or pantheism.

It is thus slightly unusual for Winton to address a religious conversion as explicitly as he does in the title story of his latest collection. ‘The Turning’ describes a battered wife’s epiphany after a period of dissatisfaction and longing, with the instant of revelation taking place as she is being bashed and raped by her husband. The lugubrious symbolism leaves no doubt that this is intended as a beatific moment. It is even suggested that there is something triumphant about her unnecessary, passive submission to this final act of violence; that she has somehow trumped her brutal spouse by becoming a believer – in part simply to spite him.