At my book group the other night, somebody asked if any contemporary novels would one day become ‘classics’, in the way that Dickens’ or Jane Austen’s novels are classic literature. I’ve just read the re-release of Tim Winton’s 2001 novel Dirt Music and I think that could easily be a classic – a novel that would endure.
Set in Western Australia, an area Winton knows very well, the novel is redolent with the beautiful though unforgiving landscape, and the people who live in it.
In her essay about Winton’s writing, Bron Sibree writes: ‘For Tim Winton stories are like splinters. Slivers of the surrounding terrain that lodge themselves under his skin, nagging him forward, until he’s given them life and form.’
This is certainly true of Dirt Music. Sibree quotes Winton himself, who explains that ‘the novel has existed only as a series of handwritten notebooks. I was going to work every day and I was working on them, and they were the book, but they weren’t a story. I started travelling in the North because I could just smell something. Like the smell of rain.’
Eventually, the story came together. It’s a magnificent novel.
