Reviews

Dirt Music by Tim Winton

basedgoth's review against another edition

4.0

ripped through the second half of this to my own surprise.

Dirt Music is my second Tim Winton novel, after Cloudstreet, and i’ve decided i like it quite a bit more.
gotta love Tim Winton and his skill at crafting quintessential Western Australia from his words. pages and pages and pages of descriptions of earth and trees and sand and reefs. great if you’re into that kinda thing. nothing is drowned in dialogue. what you find is a love story, but it’s buried under the surface and you wanna keep digging.

sloatsj's review against another edition

2.0

"The covers of this book are too far apart."
— Ambrose Bierce

gabphe1's review against another edition

5.0

Immersive, for a long book I kept wishing there was more.

annebrooke's review against another edition

2.0

I really wanted to like this book as I've read and enjoyed other Tim Winton fiction in the past. Here, he seems to lose control of both the plot and the characters very early on, and tries to cover it up with lots - and lots and lots - of irritating description. Really, it could easily have been cut by a good two-thirds and might then have been a decent novel. Sadly, for me, this is a failure.

jayden_mccomiskie's review against another edition

2.0

Eh, twang. Boab. Fish. not a win-ton.

lilithsternins's review

4.5

SO. MANY. FEELINGS. 

Okay so I admit I probably would have hated this and DNFed it if not for Kelly Macdonald but it really stuck with me for some reason. The subtle descriptions and mannerisms of trauma and isolation... complicated pasts and all that. I ate it up even though the plot/romance was dumb. I actually didn't like Lu much. Like I'm sorry

your family died

but man up or get help. Georgie was okay albeit strange when it came to the love scenes. Like... okay. Then Jim was so intriguing just GAH. I loved it. And I want Bird to have her own book. 

Would have been five stars if not for Georgie being weird and a couple other things. 

kaceyymair's review against another edition

I just did not like the main character one bit and i sort of lost it when she went skinny dipping in her dead mums pool 

freshkatsu's review against another edition

3.0

When I think of Australia, I think of orange desert, furry animals, the ocean, snakes, big rocks, dirt roads, land, a LOT of land. As a country with one of the lowest population density, it is easy to fantasise about vanishing into the endless land ahead and leaving civilisation behind. It is not that romantic though, think about the sun burn, dehydration, windstorm, and boredom that would drive you insane. You know how famous landmarks - bridges, skyscrapers, tend to gather people with suicidal intention? So why do so few people choose say, the Simpson desert, as their final destination? I don't know much about psychology, but I think one of the reason is the effort it would take to consciously die in the wilderness, or rather, the agony of it. There is not instant death but you can't be a permanent hermit either. It is like punishing yourself in a a hotel with five-star view in hell.

Dirt music revolves around three people: Georgie Jutland, the private school educated nurse who is married to Jim Buckridge, a fisherman in small town Western Australia and Luther Fox, a retired musician whom Georgie has an affair with. Dirt music is also much more than the relationship between them, it is a platform of self-reflection and alienation. The connections between the characters are superficial, they are merely titles imposed on them by the intolerant, close-knitted community they exist in. It is no coincidence that the three protagonists are drawn to the wilderness, albeit for vastly different reasons. They seek redemption and enlightenment through the epic journey into this little island at the edge of the Indian ocean where the ending takes place. To me, it is the ending that makes the read remarkable, everything is so obvious, inevitable, they are broken people to start with and end up choosing to exile to the harsh Australian landscape. A down side is that the characters tend to be static like the environment. Dynamic personalities are compromised by constant self-pitying and dull monologues. Most of the time they brood and sulk around in between gorgeous exploration of the outdoor.

Dirt music is a sentimental book and I am absorbed by its rural charm. Imagine yourself, alone at night, overlooking an infinity of messy mangroves, dark water and thick twisted tree. This is what reading the book feels like, you are involuntarily terrified by the mystery and danger, yet the beauty is almost touchable. Winton captures the spirit of the typical Australian bogan culture, but at the same time gives it another dimension that city dwellers are ignorant of.

cf1990xxx's review against another edition

adventurous dark mysterious slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

ckcombsdotcom's review against another edition

4.0

It took a couple of chapters, but this book got me by the brain cells and I was hooked. Set in Australia and full of Aussie terms and phrases, there were times I didn't know exactly what kind of tree, animal or person they were talking about, but it didn't matter. The story was great, the characters were revealed in layers, which made the story deeper and deeper the more I read.

One thing that threw me off was the ending. I won't spoil it, but the author introduces a scenario that I think was overly dramatic and unnecessary. And frankly, felt out of place. For me it interrupted the flow he had created and that I was riding with great satisfaction. It didn't ruin the story for me, but I did subtract one star.