A Review of Tim Winton's Dirt Music

Lu and Georgie parallel one another in many ways. Both have memories which taunt their dreams – Lu’s memory of his family, and their tragic accident, along with his minute betrayals, and Georgie’s memories of her nursing days in Saudi, especially Mrs Jubail, a woman whose disfiguring cancer mocks Georgie’s sense of power, and her ability to heal. Both Lu and Georgie are “rebels”. Georgie rebels against shallowness, against the shopping trolleys of her mother or well to do infidelity of her father. Lu rebels against licensing laws, against the unwritten rules of society, and both Georgie and Lu remain outsiders, unable to fit into the wealthy but uneducated fishing community Lu grew up in and Georgie inhabits. Both are readers, and thinkers, sensualists and romantics calling themselves pragmatists.

The love story between Lu and Georgie is an unusual one, which occurs mainly in the absence of one another. In a seriously romantic gesture, but also a hopeless one, since he is without anywhere else to go, and has no reason to expect to be found, Lu heads towards Georgie’s dream island, while Georgie cleans Lu’s abandoned house, and begins nesting there in a similarly hopeless gesture. Both dream of the other, and explore the other in absentia, shaping their lives across the absence. One wonders whether such intensity would be possible in proximity, or whether the reality of life together could be so beautiful, however, that doesn’t matter. This is the story of platonic, ideal love, and one of the most moving bits of prose in the novel is when Lu recreates Georgie with his makeshift guitar: “You’re a resonating multiplication. You’re a crowd. You’re the stones at Georgie’s back and the olives shaken to the dirt at her feet. All the hot sweet night you’re the hairs on the back of her arm”.

There are some interesting stylistics which occur in the structure of the novel, and in Winton’s narrative. While the passages taking Georgie’s point of view are all in third person, Lu’s are in first. This give’s Lu’s chapters a particularly submerged, almost stream of consciousness feel, as his clipped sentences capture the immediacy of sensation: “Swims in a winy sea. All round him, in a mist, the piping breaths of the dead; they surge and swirl and fin beneath, roundabout, alongside him. It smells of soil, their breath, of soil and creekmud and melons. He hauls himself along

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