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Introduction: Tim Winton's Cloudstreet
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20315 |
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BOOK WORLD
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6 / 1992 |
391 Words |
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Australian novelist Tim Winton has been called a wunderkind since he began winning his country's major literary awards age twenty-one. Ten years later, Cloudstreet, his tenth book and fifth novel, was published in Australia; it sold so well that a fourth printing was required within two months. Cloudstreet went on to win the Australian National Book Council's prestigious Banjo Award. In Great Britain, it won the English Deo Gloria Book Award and was nominated for the Booker Prize. Upon its American Publication, at lease one reviewer remarked that the wunderkind had indeed come of age.
Cloudstreet is the story of two large working-class Australian families: the Pickleses--haplessly idolatrous, somewhat libertine, struggling to cope with the father's compulsive gambling, and the Lambs--rigid, hardworking, fundamentalist Christians struggling to regain lost faith. The two families inhabit an enormous old house in Perth for twenty years, grappling to share the same physical if not the same spiritual space. The house is haunted and seems hostile; the narrator, brain-damaged Fish Lamb, relates the events of two decades, both the miraculous and the mundane, in a momentary burst of illumination. By novel's end, the two families feel the house has become their home, that they belong to it.
Cloudstreet has been called Winton's hymn to his country, and, as Martin Wroe commented in the Independent, many Australian readers found "a strange allegorical resonance in the story of two cultures struggling to come to terms with each other and with a huge, brooding property on which they are vainly trying to settle comfortably." Although told in Australian working-class vernacular, Cloudstreet is a compelling depiction of the universal struggle of
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