Fiction: 'So much of his youth seems to have taken place in an altogether different country - teenage pregnancies, the roll-call of who died or went to jail before they reached their majority," Gail despairingly remarks of her husband, Vic. This is Tim Winton country and they do things differently there writes, Mary Morrissy.
Anyone who has read Dirt Music will recognise it - the jaded Australian harbour town with its dying industries of whaling and canning, the stinking meat plant, the roiling sea and the degraded landscape, its scrub and marsh - so lovingly rendered by Winton - carved out into suburban blocks and tamed inexpertly by men with mowers. It may sound like Loserville but Winton writes about it with a brisk, elegiac intelligence.
The Turning presents as a collection of short stories but has the slow burn and concentrated resonance of the best novels. The stories, 17 in all, are set in suburbia or the small town terrain of Angelus, but it is only after a while that the reader makes sense of the glancing connections between the stories.
Winton returns most often to Vic Lang, a policeman's son. We see him newly arrived in Angelus, an outsider because of his father, his first sexual experience with a girl with a missing finger - wickedly titled Abbreviation - then as a disturbed adolescent cradling his father's gun and looking through its sights at imagined enemies lurking in the undergrowth. "You know you're waiting so intently for trouble that you're making trouble happen."
It is only afterwards we realise that this is not Columbine or a testosterone-fuelled fantasy. There are actually forces at work out there - in the form of police corruption and drug dealers - which have forced Vic's father to abandon ship. Later, we see his wife, Gail, making weekend pilgrimages to Angelus in a bid to understand the honourable but closed-off adult Vic has become.
In between there is Raelene, brutalised by her husband, living in a trailer park, who achieves an odd redemption through her friend's faith and a Jesus snow globe; Agnes, who fishes for cockles and burns her way out of Angelus; Jackie who befriends the town's bad boy and who, years later and separated by thousands of miles, is the only "friend" he can call on to have him committed. Winton inhabits his cast of characters almost as fiercely and loyally as he does the landscape in which the "leaf litter from the peppermints smells medicinal" and the beaches and bays "turn the colour of dirty tin".
If there is one criticism - and it is a small, carping one - it is that in one or two of these stories the endings seemed over- determined. In Big World, for example, two teenage boys, the narrator and his friend, Biggie, escape their dead-end jobs in Angelus's meat plant in a beat-up VW van - this is the 1970s - and head for the big world of the title, an unspecified place further north on the coast where they could "rub baby oil into a girl's strapless back". Needless to say, they don't make it. The VW explodes on "the samphire edges of a saltpan". But the huge empty landscape produces an epiphany of sorts. "Right now standing with Biggie on the salt lake at sunset . . . I don't care what happens beyond this moment. In the hot northern dusk, the world suddenly gets big around us, so big we just give in and watch."
But Winton gallops forward in time giving us a pen picture of what does happen to these characters - Biggie will be killed in a mining accident within a year, Briony Nevis, the girl whom the narrator has renounced, will be "tired and lined in a supermarket queue" and the narrator will go back, defeated, to Angelus. Somehow it robs these boys of the spontaneity of their moment.
But then this is Tim Winton country; they do things differently there.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist and critic
The Turning. By Tim Winton, Picador, 317pp. £16.99