Book Review: Dirt Music
After finishing Shantaram, I picked up Dirt Music, a novel by Australian novelist Tim Winton. The way I chose the book was as follows: I went to a bookstore in Udaipur. They had a disappointing selection of English-language books, none of which spoke to me. I then returned to the haveli I was staying at and asked the manager if he had any English language books. He had four. Dirt Music was the only one that looked halfway good.
By the way, this haveli manager, unprompted, told me how great he thought Shantaram was. So I guess not all Indians are offended by the book!
Anyway, onto Dirt Music. It’s a novel set in Australia. Yes, I wanted to read about India, but beggars can’t be choosers. At least much of the book is set near the Indian Ocean.
Dirt Music follows Georgie, a 40 year-old former nurse married to a fisherman in the small village of White Point, near Perth in Western Australia. Her husband, Jim, is not really the talking type, and it’s wearing Georgie down: she has become, essentially, an alcoholic.
Meanwhile, Luther Fox is holed up in his family farmhouse, illegally fishing the coast. He and Georgie meet; romance ensues. What could be a promising connection is cut short when Lu flees West Point out of fear of what Jim will do to him when he discovers the romance.
Lu then treks to Northwest Australia, where he roughs it, living off the land. Georgie and Jim lapse back into a strained silence. She starts moving her stuff into Lu’s abandoned farmhouse, not sure if he will return but needing some escape. Lu fantasizes about her. Then Jim reveals that he knows where Lu is, and wants to take Georgie to find him. This, the fisherman says, is his way of making amends for the various wrongs he’s done.
Ok, so everything is hunky-dory, right? Jim is letting his malcontented wife go to another man, one who is clearly better suited for her. So why is he the villain of the story?
The main issues in Dirt Music, then, are not any fundamental differences of perspective, but more the characters’ inability to communicate effectively. Jim is so enslaved by rage that he can hardly communicate his good intentions. Georgie, for reasons that are less well explained, hardly confronts Jim about them. Lu is withdrawn, almost comically so, and given to flight instead of talk. Put these three characters together and it’s no surprise it takes them 400 pages to halfway reconcile.
Still, I found myself thinking as I read that Jim, Georgie’s husband, was getting a raw deal. Sure, the man is no saint — that much is made abundantly clear — but he’s in some way the most complex character in the book, the person who is trying hardest to overcome his natural disadvantages and to do the right thing. This is interesting, but not sufficiently probed: we learn about one of the bad things Jim did, but it isn’t bad enough to fully explain the guilt and rage he feels. That’s something the book just doesn’t try to grapple with.
Instead, the focus is Georgie and Lu: two characters who are, while self-centered to a degree, fairly likable and well-adjusted. Yes, Georgie is an alcoholic without a career, but we know if she just had more love in her life that’d be fixed. Lu is a loner, but if he was just loved properly… etc. And why does everyone Lu is close with keep dying? It’s a little convenient, and not a substitute for having a personality.
Lu goes around reciting poetry to himself and reminiscing about playing “dirt music” — bluegrass, folk, blues — with his deceased brother, Darkie. He cannot play music because he is haunted by the quadruple death of his brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew, of which he was the lone survivor (oh, and he also saw his mom get impaled by a tree branch). He’s a kind soul who loves music and poetry and sees the beauty in the world. He just needs someone like Georgie to see him and value him properly so he can heal.
This is nice and all, and may even be true of some relationships. But I doubt love is always so simple, and I doubt anyone as good-hearted and indeed simple as Lu has ever walked among us mere mortals. We are all of us unfortunately more Jim than Lu — or at least in equal measures given to rage and music. Lu realizes, late in the book, that his older brother wasn’t always so good to him, taunting Lu with his hot sister-in-law and relying on Lu to raise his nieces and nephews. Would this deep wrong only hit most of us when we’re 35? Would most of us have so little desire to live our own lives? It’s hard for at least this city boy to imagine, but then again, I wasn’t raised on dirt music.