Cloudstreet

 

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Continuing on with my quest to read more Australian fiction and become acquainted with some of the brilliant authors that live in my own backyard, I have just closed the cover on a book celebrated as ‘the modern Australian classic’. An engaging look at post-war working Australia, this week’s book was Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet.

The Pickles and the Lambs are two rural Australian families brought together by tragedy. After Sam Pickles loses an arm and most of his family’s money, his luck turns when he inherits a rickety house near the city. The terms of the inheritance say that the family must live there for 20 years before they can sell, so as a means of bringing in a little money, Sam divides the house in half and advertises for tenants. Enter the Lambs, a large family who have just had their son brought back from the brink of death, though not altogether ‘there’ anymore. While the two families don’t entirely get along at first, life has a way of changing people’s dreams and attitudes and over the course of twenty years the Pickles and the Lambs see each other succeed, fail, live, love, starve, gorge, laugh, and cry, until the big old house on Cloudstreet becomes more than a house to them.

It’s always interesting to read a book that is driven by its characters rather than an over-arching narrative. With a mystery or adventure, there’s some quest or goal that the characters are usually driven towards, but in Cloudstreet the cast are left to their own devices and while some dramatic things do happen to them, most of the narrative events are the result of their own doing and not external forces. There is a common trend in Australian fiction (at least in the books I’ve been recently reading) of chronicling character-driven, down-to-earth, real-life stories and exploring the way people and places can affect the protagonists: the postmodern movement. This is something I’ve only just noticed and it’s starting to inspire and nurture a special love for Aussie authors who share a common fascination in the relationships between people and places. It also shows a phenomenal grasp on language and the power of words because the books that I’ve been reading have all been moving, vibrant, and captivating page-turners without telling a particularly thrilling or adventurous tale. 

Cloudstreet is the newest addition to this pool of real-world magic fascination and appreciation. Winton's prose is crisp and poetic, but also sloppy and ockerish, particularly when he’s writing from the perspective of his rural characters. His stylistic choice to break the story into clumps of milestone years, filled with smaller chapters (some only being a paragraph) actually compels the pace of the book rather than disjoints it, which one would expect. Sometimes because there is so little written on a page, you feel like you’re really making progress and before you know it, you’ve read an additional ten. 

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The second thing to stand out structurally in Cloudstreet is Winton’s refusal to use quotation marks when writing dialogue. While this is not really anything new, it’s not a technique often seen and it has this interesting effect on the reading experience in that it also propels the flow rather than jerks it along like some dialogue can. I feel like there could be more significance to the choice to do it this way, but I’m not clever enough to see it. I still appreciated it though. 

A glorious mixture of the charismatic and the crass, Cloudstreet is a great book with fascinating characters, a simple setting, and a remarkable exploration into the ways in which external people and places can shape a life. It’s definitely a classic for a reason and I would recommend it.

Author: Tim Winton, 1991

Published: McPhee Gribble, 1991. Published by Penguin, 1992. Pictured edition published by Penguin, 1998.