On the back cover of the Picador edition, Eyrie is described as “a heart-stopping novel written with breath-taking tenderness. Funny, confronting, exhilarating and haunting, it asks how, in an impossibly compromised world, we can ever hope to do the right thing”. Tim Winton’s Eyrie is indeed a truly haunting and haunted novel, whose plot line and structure haunt the reader until the very end of the narrative and even far beyond. Not surprisingly then, the novel is a real page-turner.
Eyrie narrates the story of Tom Keely, fiftyish, hungover, drug addicted, jobless, wifeless, and childless. Waking up one day in his flat, ten-oh-seven, tenth floor, top of the Mirador high-rise, Fremantle, Western Australia, Keely stumbles upon a mysterious stain on his carpet, damp, sodden, the shape of an exclamation mark. Hot walks, cool drinks, booze, pills, nausea, faintness, this is what Keely’s life boils down to until he chances upon his childhood neighbour and friend Gemma Buck and her introverted six-year-old grandson Kai. Chased down by his past and by the heroism of his late father, Keely resolves to help Gemma: he will keep an eye on Kai during her night shifts. In spite of the boy’s freakishness, his autistic traits, his unsettling nightmares, and the sense of doom overflying him, Keely quickly grows to like him. This is when things are getting more complicated... and manhunt begins.
Eyrie oscillates between the detective story and the psycho-thriller. It tackles environmental and societal issues. The style is metaphorical, the language straightforward. The reader is caught by this fascinated flight of oratory and dragged down into the abyss of Keely’s mind-wandering:
Nah, the news only upheld what you understood already. What you feared and hated. How things were and would be. It was no help. Neither was the plonk, of course – only fair to concede that. Like the news, drinking offered more confirmation than consolation. And it was so much easier to fill a void than to contemplate it.
Still gnashing at that meatless bone. Let it go. Concentrate on chocking down the morning’s free-range analgesics. And stay vertical. Think up.
Well, the upside was he hadn’t died in the night. He was free and unencumbered. Which is to say alone and unemployed. And he was in urgent need of a healing breakfast. Soon as all his bits booted up. Just give it a mo.
Gliding through the streets of Fremantle, Keely’s narrative skilfully alters between free indirect speech and stream of consciousness. His is the story of the unsayable, of that which is on the brink, on the border of disclosure, hovering between consciousness and unconsciousness. Keely’s memory is like a sieve and his narrative is out of joint: he often cannot remember his past, keeps forgetting where he has been and wakes up in unknown places at unknown times, dislocated, after some blackout, public fainting episode or panic attack. It is then the role of the reader, who works as a listener, witness, and therapist, to assemble the broken pieces of the protagonist’s life and narrative, as well as of all that remains unsaid, and shape it into a full story.
The novel’s mordant wit, cynicism and humour recall the mock-heroic style: Keely is the embodiment of the present-day antihero and middle-class cast-off, out of his depth, searching for something worth living for in a fallen, disillusioned world driven by corruption and violence. Left stranded, washed-up from the world of environmental idealism and activism, Keely wanders the foreshore of time, this marginal zone between past and present, lost but searching “to mean something again” between the tides of his own life.
The characters in Winton’s novel are complex, multifaceted and flawed. Eyrie studies people on the edge of life and reason, tormented by their past yet seeking redemption in contemporary Australia by trying to save the world. Interestingly enough, these characters are depicted with outstanding subtlety and truthfulness, and yet, the reader still has to look out for clues, read between the lines, gather evidence, and put the pieces of the jigsaw together into highly elaborate psychological constructs. To complicate matters, absent characters are as much present as those encountered physically by Keely: they visit from the past through phone calls, the news, and shared memories.
Met with excitement, highly praised and shortlisted for the Australian Miles Franklin Award, Eyrie is Tim Winton’s 9th novel. It is a dark and beautiful tale, whose rhythmic, enthralling prose and open ending will haunt its readers, leaving them puzzled for a while after putting the book down.
Valérie-Anne Belleflamme
Mars 2015
Valérie-Anne Belleflamme enseigne la littérature anglaise et américaine à l'ULg. Ses principales recherches portent sur la temporalité et le contre-discours dans l’œuvre de Gail Jones. Elle est également membre du CEREP (Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherche en Etudes Postcoloniales) de l’Université de Liège.
