(Published by Picador)
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Trying to keep up with the bookclub reading from New Zealand sometimes isn’t easy. While I’m lucky enough to have a great library close by which has most of the books chosen, sometimes the person taking the book out – ie myself – hasn’t exactly checked the proper title. Therefore this month I ended up with Tim Winton’s Dirt Music instead of An Open Swimmer. I have to say that there were no complaints as I got completely hooked and, like the time I read his fourth novel, Cloudstreet, wasn’t able to sleep until I finished it
Dirt Music is the story of two outsiders in a small, unforgiving Australian town – Georgie Jutland, a former nurse coming to the inevitable end of another relationship, and poacher Luther Fox, a man in mourning for a life that was suddenly shattered.
Winton doesn’t hurry the narrative along in any way, with digressions into the past, the local oddballs and rich evocations of the harsh Western Australian environment. By the end of the book you won’t feel, as one of the characters says about Georgie, like someone who has wandered into the cinema three reels into the film.
Although nature plays a strong role in Dirt Music, the picture Winton paints of humankind is mostly bleak and it is his attitude towards people that keeps you guessing until the unexpected, and highly unlikely, ending. Like Cloud Street, Dirt Music has its flaws but they are both books that will remain with you long after you’ve put them down. 
Score: 3 out of 5
Read our review of Tim Winton’s An Open Swimmer
