‘Juice’ is the story Tim Winton didn’t want to write.

It’s set in an oven-hot future, long after global societies have collapsed and the remaining humans struggle in hard-scrabble survivalist enclaves. The set-up is familiar: Earth is just about broken; humanity has turned on itself and a few hardy souls fight back against all odds. But this isn’t petrolhead-porn like ‘Mad Max’ or an imaginative sci-fi leap like with ‘The Hunger Games’ or ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. Winton’s dystopia is a grounded response to 30 years of strident scientific warnings. It all feels sickeningly real.     

I wasn’t sure I would get through Juice without falling into a deep depression but felt obliged to try. Winton is one of Australia’s most admired wordsmiths and a personal hero. A surfer, fisher, and big-hearted nature lover, he writes with wisdom and clarity about the Australian landscape, particularly his own turf: coastal Western Australia and desert-hugging Ningaloo.  

The writing helps but ‘Juice’ sinks its narrative hooks in from the get-go. The novel begins with an unnamed man and a mute girl driving a repurposed vehicle across a blackened desert. They’re pushing into unknown lands, avoiding bandits, looking for a fresh start. Instead, in an abandoned mine, they’re confronted by a hostile man with a crossbow. To avoid being murdered Winton’s unnamed protagonist starts telling his life story, hoping to convert his antagonist into an ally. That’s Juice in a nutshell: two men down a hot hole, one talking, one listening.             

The story within a story allows Winton to gradually reveal the intriguing background and troubled psychology of his main character. It also enables the narrator to chart how a miraculous life-sustaining planet became monumentally destroyed by its own dependents. And it’s metaphor too: Winton is also spinning a yarn with a survival imperative. He needs ...