Clocking in at 513 pages, Tim Winton’s new novel carries all the apparatus of a major publishing event. Juice is an ambitious work, technically very skilful, which seeks to delineate not only a dystopian prospect of the planet’s future but also an alternative, revisionist version of its historical past.

The book is set ‘at the frontier of the tropics’ in Western Australia, at a future time probably a couple of centuries hence. It starts with the unnamed narrator and a child seeking refuge in a disused mine, only to find themselves taken prisoner by a ‘bowman’, to whom our hero relates his life story. He begins by describing how he and his widowed mother eked out a frugal living as ‘homesteaders’ through local foraging and trading. In this era of climate catastrophe, when ‘the sun ate everything in sight’, it had become necessary to spend the months from October to April living underground; even in winter, it was impossible to go outside after mid-morning. ‘Winters were hot,’ recalls the narrator, but ‘summers lethal’. The remark on the second page about how the sun ‘[b]reaks free of all comparisons’ directly echoes the point Jacques Derrida made in ‘White Mythology’ about how the sun is ‘the nonmetaphorical prime mover of metaphor’. This is suggestive of the dense theoretical infrastructure that characteristically lies just below the surface of Winton’s colloquial brevity. Just as Winton’s early novel Shallows (1984) engages intertextually with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, so Juice self-consciously addresses the subjugation of human language to environmental, ‘nonmetaphorical’ phenomena.