Dirt Music
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More About the Author
Product Description
Scotland on Sunday April 02
Tim Winton is the real thing: a writer who can photograph a thought and pluck out the beat of a soul on a washing line.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
Winner of The Miles Franklin Literary Award, The Christina Stead Award, WA Premier's Book of the Year, Book Data/ABA Book of the Year Award, Goodreading Award-Readers Choice Book of the Year
Set in the dramatic landscape of Western Australia, "Dirt Music" tells the story of Luther Fox, a broken man who makes his living as an illegal fisherman -- a "shamateur." Before everyone in his family was killed in a freak rollover, Fox grew melons and counted stars and loved playing his guitar. Now, his life has become a "project of forgetting." Not until he meets Georgie Jutland, the wife of White Point's most prosperous fisherman, does Fox begin to dream again and hear the dirt music -- "anything you can play on a verandah or porch," he tells Georgie, "without electricity." Like the beat of a barren heart, nature is never silent. Ambitious and perfectly calibrated, "Dirt Music" resonates with suspense, emotion, and timeless truths. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Tim Winton's books are not light and easy. His characters are the walking wounded, scarred marred and often barely surviving. He besets them with harsh tragedies, violent accidents, abandonment. Sometimes their situations are so dire that you might want to put the book aside and go into the fresh air just to know that life isn't as bleak and cruel as he paints it. When you return to the narrative, wary and battle weary the chinks of light begin to appear.
Dirt Music reduced me to tears - Fox the sole survivor of a brutal family accident, an outcast of a harsh unforgiving Australian community finds love and redemption of a sort through Georgie, a woman who is as adrift as he. The novel is surprisingly suspenseful, so I won't write any more of the actual events, but God is it good! Tim Winton stands with Janette Turner Hospital as a major talent who has sprung from the arid ground of Australia.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a stunning novel in many unexpected ways, and for a newspaper such as the Mail on Sunday to say that it is "a book about the possibility and power of love" hardly even skims the surface of its beauty and its complexity.
With precious little knowledge of Australian literature, I confess to having approached it warily, and mainly on the recommendation of a trustworthy friend, although also on the strength of its having been shortlisted for the Booker Prize [in 2002]. Also - and this seems to happen more and more often these days - the blurb on the back of the paperback edition is slightly misleading: it introduces us to the two main characters, Georgie Jutland, "stranded with a fisherman she doesn't love", and Luther Fox. "Outcast". And "so begins an unlikely alliance".
But this is not particularly accurate, given that, for much of the novel, after an initial idyllic but thwarted episode, Georgie and Luther find themselves many hundreds of miles apart. And Tim Winton's novel slowly but inexorably turns into a fascinating thriller, as disturbing elements from the past slowly emerge, concerning the tragic history of Fox's family, and the role played in that tragedy by Jim Buckridge, Georgie's doltish, swaggering and somewhat sadistic partner.
From the fishing community of White Point in Western Australia, the reader travels northwards with Fox into an increasingly hostile and wild landscape against which he has to pit his wits constantly in order to survive. It is a journey into an Australian heart of darkness, and Fox, despite the music in his soul, is sometime hard pressed to continue making sense of what he sees as "a life writ in mud".
I think a couple of previous reviewers have maybe been slightly over-critical of the way the novel ends: slightly contrived as it is, it is far from being clichéd, and certainly not melodramatic.
And though I know one is not supposed to separate the style from the substance, a special mention for Tim Winton's highly original writing. The daring combinations of words, whether it's "a stiff coffee", "runty melons", "generic furniture", "a snarl of vines", "red dripping tomatoes" [the list is endless] come off, every single time. "Dirt Music" is a book suffused with poetry and music of the most intoxicating variety. And will have me reading more Tim Winton very soon.
With precious little knowledge of Australian literature, I confess to having approached it warily, and mainly on the recommendation of a trustworthy friend, although also on the strength of its having been shortlisted for the Booker Prize [in 2002]. Also - and this seems to happen more and more often these days - the blurb on the back of the paperback edition is slightly misleading: it introduces us to the two main characters, Georgie Jutland, "stranded with a fisherman she doesn't love", and Luther Fox. "Outcast". And "so begins an unlikely alliance".
But this is not particularly accurate, given that, for much of the novel, after an initial idyllic but thwarted episode, Georgie and Luther find themselves many hundreds of miles apart. And Tim Winton's novel slowly but inexorably turns into a fascinating thriller, as disturbing elements from the past slowly emerge, concerning the tragic history of Fox's family, and the role played in that tragedy by Jim Buckridge, Georgie's doltish, swaggering and somewhat sadistic partner.
From the fishing community of White Point in Western Australia, the reader travels northwards with Fox into an increasingly hostile and wild landscape against which he has to pit his wits constantly in order to survive. It is a journey into an Australian heart of darkness, and Fox, despite the music in his soul, is sometime hard pressed to continue making sense of what he sees as "a life writ in mud".
I think a couple of previous reviewers have maybe been slightly over-critical of the way the novel ends: slightly contrived as it is, it is far from being clichéd, and certainly not melodramatic.
And though I know one is not supposed to separate the style from the substance, a special mention for Tim Winton's highly original writing. The daring combinations of words, whether it's "a stiff coffee", "runty melons", "generic furniture", "a snarl of vines", "red dripping tomatoes" [the list is endless] come off, every single time. "Dirt Music" is a book suffused with poetry and music of the most intoxicating variety. And will have me reading more Tim Winton very soon.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I am not an avid reader, nor prone to writing reviews, but this book is something special.
What makes it for me is the time and effort taken to embed the characters and the plot into the western Australian environment. In essence it is a very simple story, but the magic is in the telling; a stark story told with an eloquent richness.
I found it a real pleasure to find characters explicitly shaped by, and articulated through, the intensity of the landscape around them. It reminds me of Steinbeck in part, and conjures up expansive visual images.
I stayed up till the early hours to finish this book, and - if I have a criticism - it would be that ending comes together a little too conveniently. A minor grumble though, the journey the book takes you on is quite exceptional.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
one of the few books I've read twice
I first read this when we were travelling in Western Australia. We were heading north from Perth, up the coast road thru Geraldton, Carnarvon, Port Hedland and onwards up to Broome... Read more
Published 2 months ago by rosie c
Directionless
Having greatly enjoyed Breath I wanted to try anther Winton novel. I finished Dirt Music last night and what started out a joy had tuned into a chore. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Lendrick
Dull Dirge Music
Winton seems to be desperately trying to not write with any kind of involvement. Characters lie flat on the page, scenery is black and white and emotions are kept well hidden. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Dillon the Villain
Tim Winton^s Eggs
Tim Winton is a writer with remarkable gifts (as I knew already from Breath). Dirt Music is formidable piece of writing, which depicts the Australian landscape with a vividness I,... Read more
Published 18 months ago by Duncan Bush
dirt music
This book is very much a tribute to Australia the environment and the unusual characters that populate the space. Read more
Published 21 months ago by C. Woodward
poetic and gutsy
Another brilliant piece by Tim Winton. Reading some of the reviews people have shared, it strikes me that one man's meat is another man's poison. Read more
Published 22 months ago by littleredrobin
Dirt Music by Tim Winton
Gives an insight into living wild in Western Australia. Characters are obsessed and persistent, but very well observed and recorded. Read more
Published on 11 Dec 2009
Australian demotic
Georgie Jutland is becalmed, like a boat without a sail, in a small, coastal fishing town in the southern Australian temperate zone. Read more
Published on 16 Sep 2009 by Eileen Shaw
Fantastic
This is the third book I have read by Tim Winton, the first two being 'Cloudstreet' and 'That Eye, the Sky', both wonderful books. Read more
Published on 18 Aug 2009 by Weave
Not dirt music to my ears
Read this for the book club.A disappointment.A long rambling novel which lacks any warmth or any real direction. Read more
Published on 11 May 2009 by D. Glowacki
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