The way wa lives now.(Dirt Music)(Book Review)

Dirt Music, by Tim Winton; Picador, 2001, $30.

THE WAY WE LIVE Now, Trollope's panoramic satirical novel about contemporary English society, appeared in 1875. In its main diagnostic intention it belongs to the tradition of the "Condition-of-England" novel running from Disraeli's Sybil, or, The Two Nations (1845), through Dickens' late great novels, and into major twentieth-century works such as H.G. Wells' Tono-Bungay (1909). The much-gentrified ghosts of Disraeli's class-divided Two Nations still haunt television's To the Manor Born, while Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities is nothing if not a neo-Dickensian Condition-of-America novel.

In its main intentions, panoramic scope and considerable length (461 pages), Dirt Music might best be thought of as a Condition-of-Western-Australia novel. Certainly it paints an often harshly satirical picture of the Way We Live Now in this part of the world. It begins in the violent, ultra-macho, nouveau-riche fishing port of White Point. Here the forty-year-old Georgiana Jutland aimlessly surfs the interact at night for hour after hour before topping herself up with yet another glass of vodka from the refrigerator: "She'd stared at a live camera image of a mall in the city of Perth ... seen Francis Drake's chamberpot in the Tower of London ..."

In Dirt Music's social and spiritual geography White Point is located midway between the genteel refinements and would-be sophistication of metropolitan Perth and the increasingly harsh and primitive landscapes further north. The journey northwards is thus the equivalent of Marlow's journey up the Congo, in Conrad's novel, towards the heart of darkness, as is revealed through the travels of the novel's central characters. In the picaresque tradition, these journeys also anatomise our present way of life by means of the various representative types of character encountered en route. Including tourist retirees, track-drivers and left-over hippies, these are mostly portrayed in terms hardly calculated to win admiration and respect.

In Dirt Music, the journey to the spiritual heart of darkness is undertaken by Georgiana's ultimate soul-mate Luther Fox, whose experiences are uniquely described in the present tense. Just as she is a dedicated professional nurse who has lost all sense of direction, so he is a dedicated folk-musician who has lost his because of a fatal family ...