Tim Winton’s Eyrie - a review

Tim Winton’s Eyrie

On first blush this latest book by Winton tells, perhaps, what might be a typical story of a man (Keely) who has lost his bearings in middle age, down-at-heel and down-on-his-luck. He is now living in a bleak and seedy high-rise apartment at the outskirts of Freemantle, cultivating his newfound isolation while below is that society from which he's retired hurt and angry.

Page by page it is an engrossing novel; the reader is moved and enraged in equal measure by a human story of Keely and his beautiful, battered adoptive family. The story tells of how one day he runs into some neighbours: a woman he used to know when they were kids, and her introverted young boy. Here are two strangers leading a life beyond his experience and into whose world he falls despite himself. The encounter shakes him up in a way he doesn’t understand.

What follows is an amusing, confronting, exhilarating and haunting – populated by remarkable characters. It asks how, in an impossibly compromised world, we can ever hope to do the right thing.

However Eyrie is much much more than just a great story – it talks to an insidious existence that pervades modern life. A sprawling suburban world of this older generation, has been tidied up, boxed in, the ecology of childhood imagination narrowed down to computer games and paid TV. But ecology alone doesn’t excuse the main subject. We learn quite early that Keely is flawed, his reliability as a narrator questionable.

He is a man wounded in heart and mind: divorced and unemployed - "just another flannel-tongued Jeremiah with neither mission nor prophecy, no tribe to claim him but family" - shut away from friends and former colleagues, spending his days staring out from his upper floor apartment. Whether it is incipient madness or some physiological woe he suffers from is never made clear. What counts, however, is the extremity of his despair and the way it colors the narration. He is a sieve of leaking memories and his version of events is filled with empty gaps, forgotten conversations and missing hours, weird visions, and waking dreams.