Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 10 Aug 2022

Land’s Edge: a Coastal Memoir by Tim Winton

Born in 1960 in Western Australia, Tim Winton is something of a hidden gem of a writer and you don’t see his name come up very often when people are listing their favourite contemporary novelists. This might be because, oddly, Australian novelists (and other Antipodean artists) seem to always be thought of as marginal - which probably accounts for why they often find their way to Europe or North America in order to become mainstream.

Although Winton has also spent time in France, Ireland and Greece, he has always returned home and Western Australia remains his spiritual home as well as his physical one. Land’s Edge, a short memoir, goes a long way to explaining just how deep these roots go and just how important the land and seascapes of his home country are central to his work as a writer.

Although his home wasn’t actually on the coast itself, his long summers were spent on the sea margins and this is where he felt himself - a place where he could breath and expand. And it was the coast of Western Australia in particular that gave him this buzz - time spent by the sea in other countries was never a substitute for the quasi-religious experience of his preferred coastline.

Short as it is - just over 110 pages - Winton barely bothers with any kind of structure. This is more like a collection of memories, prose poems and philosophical contemplations that almost seem to tumble from the author in a buzz of revery. His communion with the sea and coastline is positively mystical and reviewing the book for The Guardian, Jessica Holland put it this way:

‘He has been in love with the ocean ever since and writes about it with an almost religious reverence. Free diving as a teenager, he would "understand the Christian mystics for moments at a time", and hold his breath until "the final forgetfulness hovered at the edge of vision”.’

Probably the standout incident in the book is his description of his time swimming alongside an eight meter long whale shark who is considerably less interested in him than the awestruck human is in the massive aquatic beast. Although the rest of the book is written as a first person testament, Winton slips across into the third person to describe this encounter - a linguistic  and stylistic trick that allows him to emphasise the ‘otherness’ of this underwater meeting.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this book would turn into a random and indulgent meander but the author’s strength is his craft and facility with describing a landscape utterly alien to someone like me who remains resolutely landlocked. I admire and love the sea but I’m not by instinct or inclination a beach-dweller but Winton’s lovely prose can transport even the most lumptious individual. 

I can’t do better than end with Roger Cox’s review for The Scotsman:

“..what really makes Winton stand out amongst his peers is the diamond-tipped precision of his descriptive writing, and in Land’s Edge we get a gloriously concentrated dose of it. In his fiction, like all novelists, Winton has to wrestle with the complexities of character and plot, but in Land’s Edge he is almost entirely freed from these restrictions and so can focus his linguistic firepower on bringing a series of episodes from his enviable coastal existence searingly to life.”

Paper and hardback copies are easily available on the secondhand market for well under £5.

 

Terry Potter

August 2022