Juice

Sam's Review 

If this is the future, then we’re in deep, deep trouble. This is the crux of Winton’s argument in his new novel Juice. Set some centuries into the future, his novel centres on a nameless protagonist eking out an existence as a homesteader just outside a hamlet on the northern peninsula of Western Australia. The world has long gone to hell in a handcart, nature wreaking its revenge for years of damage to the environment. Against a backdrop of ancient oil rigs still burning off the coast and a land scorched to within the last sprouting of life, the middle-aged homesteader tells his story to the man holding him and his child companion captive.
 
Unlike many dystopian novels, which typically begin with chapters of scene-setting, Juice dives straight into the plot. The homesteader’s story of the harshness of this life feels both plausible and utterly terrifying. Everyone has been reduced to self-subsistence farming and trading: a chicken for a battery pack, a power tool for a box of cave-grown veggies, summers spent living underground. Winters are hot, the summers lethally so. People are covered in white scab or suffer from pink cankers that slowly eat away at them. As the homesteader succinctly concludes: “It’s rare to see people of great age."
 
We hear early in the novel of the homesteader’s meeting as a young man with a mysterious group. They show him photos and videos of the before-times, of people “plump and shiny as melons” and of “sleek cars in wild colours.” But we also learn of the horror of “roads strewn with bodies...an angry sea the colour of bearing grease ... gaps between buildings filled with storm surge.” The group turns out to be part of a global network committed to ending the bloodlines of those responsible for the current nightmare state of the world: the oil companies, lawyers, politicians, and others who sold the future to enjoy their luxurious, indulgent present. 
 
As the story progresses, the homesteader leaves his hamlet to head off on missions of vengeance, braving the harshest environments along the way. He breaches the fortresses his targets have lived within before the arrival of the apocalypse: a reference to the bunkers already built by today’s billionaires. He meets his wife, discovers the innocent joy of children, and battles with having to keep his secrets from them. We follow his tense, devoted but cold relationship with his mother, and we learn what brought him to his position of being a captive, held underground at arrowpoint with another member of the resistance.
 
Winton has been a lifelong, passionate environmentalist, and his new book is a guttural roar of frustration and rage at our abuse of the natural world. All the science tells us that we need to change our attitudes and behaviour; Juice implores us to hold to account those responsible for environmental devastation, and to take action to save the planet. Winton’s anger in this new book is both palpable and timely.

Gabi's Review

My father repeatedly advised me as a child: "If you don't have anything nice to say Gabrielle, don't say anything at all." Tim Winton has nothing nice to say about the future in his latest dystopian post-climate change novel Juice, but he has managed the difficult task of delivering a pacy, compelling thriller about the imminent earth system collapse without preaching to the reader.

Juice delivers its Mad Max aesthetic with grit and authenticity, focused on survival and retribution with visceral clarity. The macro theme sees members of a resistance army surviving in subterranean bolt holes in a broiling unrecognisable Western Australian north. In the style of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, Juice employs a retrospective narrative in the interrogation of the unnamed hostage protagonist. He gives an account of his role as part of a resistance militia attempting to take down the techno-feudal overlords who were the architects of the climate apocalypse. In a damning Song of Names-style chant, he reels off the names of the major oil and gas conglomerates responsible for the crisis. The hostage narrative works well as a plot device for the climate degradation story and eliminates the need for a resolution. The implication is that we must act now to prevent the corporate endgame.

However, while Winton has rendered a future dystopian landscape with seamless verisimilitude, his characters feel more 1980s than decades far into the future. The pivotal mother-son relationship reads like a cut-and-paste of his novel Blueback. While the novel rails against free market economics for causing environmental devastation, its surprising blind spot is the absence of the influence of technology. While ‘the Sims’ – Winton’s AGI robots- are a hilarious and much-needed linking device, their human-aligned values seem naïve in the context of the current damaging trajectory of AI in big tech. These are highly personal reservations in what is otherwise a thoroughly immersive page-turner.

Juice is topical, political and representative of Winton’s abiding passion for the environment. He earns his merits once again as a National Living Treasure. This is a detailed expose of our global society blindsided and bankrupted by corporate greed as our once abundant planet progressively transitions into a living hell.

Publisher's Review 

An epic novel of determination, survival, and the limits of the human spirit. This is Tim Winton as you've never read him before.

Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place - middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They're exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they've seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work.

Problem is, they're not alone.

So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism.

'Juice, Winton has said, means "human resilience and moral courage", and there is that in spades in this complex, riveting book already being hailed as a masterpiece.' - SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

'A hold-your-breath adventure set in an utterly plausible, sun-hammered future, JUICE will stab your conscience and break your heart.' - EMMA DONOGHUE

'A searing but essential look at Earth after the human-induced apocalypse. Too real to be true. Too true to be real.' - BOB BROWN

'Exciting . . . ambitious . . . Juice breaks new ground to face the climate emergency.' - THE CONVERSATION

'Every machine-tooled sentence is its own reward . . . the sheer length of the novel becomes its greatest pleasure. Winton drives Juice towards its conclusion with a narrative force that feels almost cyclonic.' - GEORDIE WILLIAMSON, THE AUSTRALIAN

'A must-read masterpiece from one of Australia's most celebrated writers.' - STEPHEN ROMEI, SATURDAY PAPER

'Blistering . . . propulsive, addictive.' - JOE RUBBO, READINGS

'Full of surprises and stunning originality.' - SIMON SMART, ABC ONLINE