Are you a Mad Max fan? Read this brilliant eco-thriller

Tim Winton’s twisty new novel, Juice, portrays a mother-son relationship in a world ravaged by climate change and violent marauding gangs

5/5
A century into the future – possibly centuries – an unnamed narrator drives across deserts of ash in a solar-powered jerry-rigged truck full of gadgets for purifying water and growing food. His companion is a silent, traumatised girl; she is not his daughter. Humanity has degenerated into violent marauding gangs, though this is a fairly recent development. When the duo reach an abandoned mine – possibly somewhere they can make home – they’re accosted by a rough-looking man with a crossbow who seems to be weighing up whether he should let them live or die. The rest of Juice, Tim Winton’s 12th novel, is our narrator’s life-story as told to their captor.
The novel is set in the aftermath of a climate breakdown. It thus marks a return to a subject the Australian novelist has refined over a 40-year career, in which he has melded rare literary pedigree with a tireless advocacy of environmental and conservationist causes. Here he depicts societies that, in the still-inhabitable regions of Earth, have become rooted in a code of decency. For half the year, people have to live underground on account of the heat, anaesthetising the tedium with a kind of chewing weed. In the other half, they can emerge to work on their grow-houses, or trade in the local hamlet. This code of conduct assumes the status of a new religion: it’s so hard to grow a crop and harvest drinkable water that no-one can survive if they don’t all behave. 
As a child, the narrator lost his father at sea, so he grows up on a small farm with his stern but dedicated mother. One day, as a teenager, trying to barter for a spare part at the local market, he’s seized and taken to an underground bunker where he’s recruited by a resistance movement, the Service. They use an archive of films, playing news footage before and after the disaster, to teach him that the state of the world isn’t a natural phenomenon, but something that’s been inflicted on everyone. It gradually emerges that the wealthy and powerful still exist in this world, but they’ve gone into hiding. In fortified bunkers, guarded caves, on distant platforms in the sea, they continue to live a comfortable existence with servants and whatever luxuries they can have delivered by their collaborators.
These villains are oligarchs and oil barons, but also lawyers, politicians, journalists. Anyone, in fact, who contributed to the way of life that systematically destroyed the world. Only, this being several generations into the future, it’s not actually them but their descendants, in some cases their great-great-grandchildren, who’re still living off the proceeds. “Some faked ignorance,” our narrator recalls. “Others pretended to care and promised to change course. But all along the most powerful knew what was coming, what it was costing. They hid that knowledge. Buried it. Confused it. Diluted it. To gain advantage, accrue more riches, and, finally, time enough to prepare themselves for flight.” The job of the Service is to eliminate them by sending teams of assassins, not so much out of vengeance as to purify whatever’s left of humanity for a brighter future, free of radical self-interest – to remove the cancer, as it were. 
The narrator is good at his job, and is soon put in command of missions, but must never speak a word of his actions when he returns home. Some of those actions, while coolly dispatched, are unspeakable anyway. In this sense, Juice is a war novel, with the good guys exhausted and brutalised. We’re given the dual pleasures of a minutely detailed account of surviving and enduring, interspersed with some of the most high-octane thriller writing I’ve come across; the missions, which range from massacring an eccentric community on a decorative deep-sea outpost to turning a family into compressed bricks via a waste disposal compressor, are at times horrifying and at times wonderfully surreal. Winton is also astute on the pain of a double life, for his narrator has to return, however injured and traumatised, with the cover story that he’s been out salvaging in the desert – which both his mother and, after he meets a travelling vet’s assistant, his wife, find less-than-convincing.
Interjections from the bowsman, himself a Comrade and former member of the Service, arrive every couple of chapters, usually to express incredulity or boredom or to ask for more sexually explicit detail. This reminds us that the entire novel is being recounted out loud, while the girl sleeps, the bowsman the only audience. The narrator’s story acts as his identification papers, his shibboleth, but it’s also a way of surviving the night, for him and his ward. It’s possible, throughout, that he’s just spinning a yarn, trying to entertain his jailer: Mad Max meets 1,0001 Nights. (Juice, I think, would make a magnificent film.)
Winton delivers it all in clean and unaffected prose. The twists are plausible and devastating, including several ingeniously subverted sci-fi tropes. The love story and mother-son dynamic have emotional and psychological depth. At first, I’d anticipated something like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but Winton’s novel is stoic rather than nihilistic – a furious hymn to resilience, unsentimental and hard-won. 
Juice is published by Picador at £22. To order your copy for £18.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
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