Books: Minimum of Two, by Tim Winton

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Tim Winton is my favourite novelist writing in English today. And I think in some ways he's more suited to the short story than the novel.

His male characters are generally stuck, mentally and emotionally, going round in circles and unable to break old habits; his female characters have more gumption, but their lives still change in baby-steps. Everyone, to some extent, is still the prisoner of things that happened to them as adolescents or young adults. As a result, he's better at capturing that sort of pregnant stasis that informs some of the great short stories, rather than the movement that you need to animate a novel.

I was switched on to him by 'The Turning', a collection of stories from 2004 which gradually coalesces into a sort of novel. Characters recur through different stories at different stages of their lives; eventually it builds into a sort of messy coming-of-age story for a community, or even a sensibility. It's not a new technique but it's beautifully handled and his empathy for the characters shines from every page.

"Minimum of Two" is in many ways a dry run for "The Turning", in that there's likewise a couple of recurring stories threaded through the collection, both of them picking up on characters from earlier novels. The main strand here tells the story of a musician, his wife and child from birth to the age of three; they're young, hard up, in the suburbs of Perth, and he's struggling to cope with the build up and aftermath of his father's slow death from cancer.

It's a flimsier work than "The Turning". In particular, the title piece--with its tender but muleish male protagonist, wise but indifferent wife, and a plot filled with violence, bitterness, incomprehension and sex--looks in retrospect like a bad pastiche of a Tim Winton story. Another tale, about a cafe owner confronting death in the form of an ailing customer, is a little too neat and parable-like to carry it off.

But the characters are so powerful. His protagonists are almost all in some sort of spiritual torment--and when they're not, they're simmering in its wake or making their first attempts to move beyond it. They're haunted by their pasts in a way that's reminiscent of Graham Greene. The result is rarely monotonous or depressing, especially when Winton can write with such apt brevity.

This book's probably only for Winton fans. But even here, when he's at his best he says more in ten pages than many writers manage over the course of a career.