An Open Swimmer, published in 1982, is Tim Winton’s first short novel, and won the Australian /Vogel Award for Best First Novel. To anyone who has read any of his books, this honour will come as no surprise. He is an exceptionally talented writer, with deep insight into the human soul. Since then he has received more accolades; the Miles Franklin Award, twice (Shallows, in 1984 and Cloudstreet, in 1992), the Commonwealth Writers Prize, South East Asia and South Pacific section, in 1995, and has twice been short listed for the Booker Prize. While these have all been well deserved, it is merely a matter of time before he harvests one of the major literary prizes. I’ll wager good money on that.
He has been a prolific author since then, but his work receives less attention here than it deserves. I would wish to change that. Kindly indulge me – allow me to open your mind to his talent.
As an introduction to his work, An Open Swimmer serves admirably.
Winton’s style is sparse, and his prose stripped, pared, bordering on brutal. Language and words serve inadequately his task of bringing to paper the feelings and emotions of people, the sweeping grandeur and irresistible, immutable forces of nature. The land he lives in, the world his characters inhabit, is ancient, an overpoweringly forceful existence that pre-dates man. Perhaps, in a primordial land, about an ancient earth, one can only speak in stunted words, half-sentences, broken thoughts. Perhaps, with those long-buried memories of humans at the mercy of the elements, the half-remembered/half-forgotten terrors of existence haunting like the distant sounds of the sea, one can only write like Tim Winton. His humour is sardonic, and often oblique.
In his world, in our world, emotions are simple. People are stripped of artifice and subtlety, like his words. In the contrast between the settled earth, and the space it occupies failing to transplant what was there before, humans grapple with each other and with nature, searching for meaning.
This novel is set in his native Western Australia, a vast land where nature and the sea rule the lives of those who settle there. In a very real sense, the sea, the landscape, and nature itself are characters as much as the people Winton creates, and feature as meaningfully in his writing.
An Open Swimmer is, on the surface, a deceptively simple tale told in three parts. In Part One, Jerra Nilsam, a young man who dropped out of university after completing two years of study, then spent some time working on the boats of fishing fleets, currently unemployed, goes on a camping trip with his childhood friend, Sean. They plunge away along the coast in an ancient VW bus. The land is powerful, ever awake, ever dangerous, but also beautiful and bountiful. The harshness is unrelenting: “Brilliance held their lids against their eyes. Sun beat them into the sand.” (p.11)
Though they break away from the city, it is ever-present, and the conflicts there and within themselves, unresolved. They dive, fish, surf – repeating all the experiences of their youth, re-living the way they ran free as boys, as blood-brothers. But their relationship is complicated. Under the surface, shifting like sunlight on heaving sea, responding to the deep tug of tides, the memories of yesterday twist and turn in the shadows. They remember, reflect, think, talk, grind against each other like pebbles long in a stream.
Their friendship is not what it once was. They have drifted apart, and have been forced apart by life. Unlike Jerra, Sean finished his degree, and works for his father, a successful businessman. He lives in a company-subsidised town house in South Perth. Jerra lives with his parents, in the bedroom he occupied as a boy. Their once close bond is slipping away. The resentments of the past, and the realities of the present, have separated them. Sean has become undeserving of his trust, like an unpredictable animal. “Thought what you’re going to do?” Sean blinked, his eyes lit red. To Jerra, sometimes, they were like the eyes of a fox, drilled in a spotlight. (p.12) (A sentiment later repeated, that time about both Sean and his father, Uncle Jim.)
Winton’s characters live caught between two worlds, between city and nature, and their natures mirror the conflict. Though they leave the city behind and strike into the bush, the conflict stays present and clear. There is no running away from it.
While looking for firewood they meet an old man. He has lived in a shack in the bush, away from civilization and other people, for twenty years. They discover that he keeps a dreadful secret, and that his exile is only partly self-imposed. He used to have a boat and a wife, and now has nothing. He fears the law of man, is at the same time incapable of escaping his own, inner law – he is twice condemned. While he avoids people and towns, he grapples with the memory of what he has done. His words come with difficulty, and he is sometimes confused, mingling past and present. Their conversations are stunted, monosyllabic:
“See many people out here?”
“All that come.”
“Many come?”
“Enough.”
“When was the last?”
“Couldn’t be sure.”
“Anyone been here before?”
“Not here. Not this beach. You are the first.”
“Always a first time.”
“Everything’s been done. At least once.” (p.40.)
The only other words the old man uses are pages torn from a bible, used for rolling smokes. It’s tough going, he says, but he’s already up to Deuteronomy 18 or 19.
We also learn that Sean’s mum was Auntie Jewel, a woman who encouraged Jerra to write poetry when he was a child, but something went awfully wrong, and she died.
Words enter the picture again through the poetry, as does the civilization that accompanies it. There is no escape. Sean is reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Even nature speaks. They find a tree that says no – it has the letters NO carved deeply into the trunk. Even though it says no to Jerra, he does not know what it means, what it is telling him.
Part Two finds Jerra back in the city, in his old bedroom in his parent’s house. He is unemployed and wanders the streets. He experiences the dispossession and alienation of being an economic outcast in a community and life he knows well. “Jerra met eyes he knew, letting them blink by, clacking up the footpaths amidst the stink of rotting flowers, fluorescent windows of scaled, headless fish, the chatter of money in tills, on bars, in pockets, gutters.” (p.71)
His mother asks him why he has stopped reading. Books and words have failed him. Uncle Jim used to beat Auntie Jewel – it’s a dirty little family secret. She finally broke down and Sean came to live with them for a while.
Auntie Jewel encouraged him to write, and his grandfather taught him poems.
He visits his granddad in the old age home, who asks him if he has found a job. It’s very important that he does something. “’I never did much’, said the old man. ‘You get old ‘fore you get around to doing anything.’” (p.81).
Shortly after the visit, the grandfather dies. Uncle Jim, Auntie Jewel’s husband and Sean’s father, shows up at the funeral and brings a large wreath. Jerra is not impressed: “He’s a snake. Like his wriggling son, Sean. No, he thought. He’s a fox – with rabies. They both are.” (p.83)
Jerra and his father go on a fishing trip, where he reads his grandfather’s diaries.
When they arrive home again he reflects on the writing and the words, used by his grandfather and Auntie Jewel: “What a bunch of cripples, he thought. To resort to writing diaries and letters… and bloody books; … (p .96)
He meets a girl, Judy Thyme, and finds work in a deli. The business is owned by Al, and he is assisted by fat Rosa. Winton’s humour is wry: “Rosa was fat, a distended hotdog about to burst its red skin.” (p. 105)
With the flame of hope thus awakened, Winton moves quickly to dim it. Jerra gets into an argument with a rude factory worker. They fight in the shop and Jerra knocks him down. As a result he is fired.
His relationship with Judy seems to be progressing. She is attracted to him, but he keeps his distance.
He tells her about pearls found in the head of fish. It is a tale passed down from his grandfather and father. The pearls, he thinks, represent: “The aggregated life, the distilled knowledge of lifetimes, of ancestors, of travel, of instinct, of things unseen and unknown.” (p.135)
While Judy tries to make love to him, Jerra flees – physically bolts from the house and runs away.
Nothing works. People try to do the right thing, to survive, love, prosper, but for Jerra it all seems to end in failure.
Part Three sees him packing up and heading back into the bush. He is fleeing again, as he has done before. “Listening to the note of the engine, and tapping out its rhythms on the steering-wheel, Jerra tried to remember the things he had forgotten to bring, but it was hopeless; he hardly knew what he had, and, as always, he confused this with other trips, other forgotten things, other items to be remembered.” (p. 142)
He is searching for the shack, for the old man, for the tree that says NO.
The old man says: “Some people got bad in ‘em. Some things are too bad to let any good come any more. Some people never do anything at all. Maybe it’s better doing something bad than never doing anything all your life. At least it’s trying. You make blues. You gotta try.” (p. 158)
Jerra finds NO carved in the sand of the beach. He asks the old man what will become of him when he is too old to hunt or fish.
“Reckon I’ll know what to do.”
“And you could die trying to think of something.”
“Not too many choices.”
“And just die?”
“Others are dead an’ still walking around.” (p. 167)
While diving, and after a long struggle, Jerra spears and kills a big fish, a groper. Exhausted, having nearly been drowned by the fish in a Hemingway-esque contest, he cuts open the head to find the pearls. Instead of those repositories of wisdom and knowledge, he finds only the brain, “…the grey little brain and the black lining behind the eyes.” (p. 173)
The story of the pearls is only a fisherman’s tale. It’s a “…fisherman’s bloody superstition.” (p.169) The search is meaningless. He leaves the fish on the beach, but the old man finds him and berates him: “What are you? Gotta mutilate fish to find what you want? Why don’t you hack yourself open?” (p.174.)
Later the old man finds him again and apologises. Tells him he did well in landing the big fish.
“Beat him, didn’t I?” said Jerra, suddenly arrogant.
“No.”
“Some things you can’t get around. Your words.”
“Yer can have anythink and it’ll likely be no good. It’s how yer get it and what yer do with it, that’s what counts. Havin’ it’s nothin’. Everybody’s got things. It’s nothing.” (p.189)
He was after the pearl, Jerra tells him. The old man, reminding us of Plato’s allegory, instructs him: “Keep tryin’, boy. You ‘ad the wrong fish. Spear an open swimmer, they’re the ones. Cave fish see nothin’.” (p. 190)
As storm blows up while he is sleeping in the old VW bus and Jerra is rescued by the old man when a tree falls over and crashes through the roof of the car.
Shortly thereafter the old man dies. Jerra finds his body on the beach. It’s not clear how he died, but he wraps and weighs the body down, sinks him at sea, in a deep hole in the reef. Jerra puts on the old man’s boots. They smell, but are soft inside. He returns to his shattered bus and sets fire to it.
*
It’s a simple tale, told in a deeply complex universe. There are no starts, no finishes. Human lives are not perfectly parcelled stories. They flow like water over and around obstacles, trying to find the best way. People struggle to exist with each other and with nature. Their actions are imperfect, and they often fail. Searching for the truth - for knowledge, for wisdom, love or peace - is a difficult and painful enterprise, and, more often than not, doomed to failure.
Winton’s characters search, they have to keep trying, calling to mind Samuel Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.” (Worstward Ho, 1984).
(All quotes are from the Picador edition, 2003)
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