Cloudstreet

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
Published: 1991
Narrated by: Peter Hosking
Length: 12:50 (426 pages)

I bought this for our Australia trip and never managed to get to it while we were there, but I did read it when we returned. It follows the lives of two very different families, as they’re uprooted by circumstance from their previous homes and find themselves living in the same house on Cloudstreet in Perth. It’s an unflinching look, over multiple decades, of these two working-class families as they become involved in each other’s lives.

This isn’t a description that would typically get me excited to read a book. I’m not often a fan of stories that span over entire lifetimes. I find time jumps off-putting and they usually cause me to lose whatever connection I’ve built up with the characters, but the writing overcame any issue I had there. Tim Winton’s writing was superb, so full of life, and Peter Hosking’s narration of this audiobook was perfect. I think listening to this helped me appreciate the rhythm of the language more than I might have on paper, as I find is often also the case with novels set in the southern states.

I found the few supernatural elements in this a little jarring, but I think that was probably the point. Looking back on the novel as a whole, those moments do fit well, but they really felt out of place when they came up in the story. Maybe that is on purpose, as that sort of thing should be unexpected and confusing, and maybe if I understood the religious symbolism a bit more it would have felt more natural, but it just didn’t seem to mix smoothly with the rest of the book.

This takes place in Western Australia, where we spent half our trip, so that was an added bonus. Things have obviously changed a fair bit since the descriptions in this novel, but it was still nice to be able to mentally place events on a map. We have Dirt Music in the house, so that will likely be the next book of his I’ll try.