Set in a distant future where civilisation as we know it has crumbled, Tim Winton’s new novel takes the form of a post-apocalyptic odyssey. It opens with two fugitives, a man and a girl, driving all night across the desert – a nightmarish vision of the Australian landscape central to Winton’s work – in search of shelter. Exhausted and on the brink of desperation, they reach a mine, which looks like it could be a good resting place. They come across another man, an unnamed bowman, who, also fending for himself, is suspicious of their intentions and questions them about who they are and where they are from.

The unnamed narrator, a taciturn, defeated man, backtracks from here and begins – somewhat mechanically – to recount his life story. We learn that he grew up with his stern mother on an agrarian commune. It’s strongly hinted that such an arrangement was meant to stave off those harmful human impulses, like greed, which, unabated, led humanity to its current, barely tolerable predicament. In reality – except for a few cli fi flourishes, such as people spending time underground to avoid the heat – the lifestyle depicted isn’t too different from that of subsistence farmers eking out a meagre living on an unforgiving land. (Lacking Australian points of reference, I pictured something along the lines of the wretched lives of the sharecroppers portrayed by James Agee and Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.) Under the influence of his mother’s puritanism and feeling a growing sense of restlessness, the narrator becomes involved in a secret cabal of activists called ‘The Service’ who commission him to kill representatives of the old order, remnants of old corporations now turned into clans, who implicitly threaten the morally superior – however miserable – life on the plains.

In its depiction of an extreme form of Luddism, Juice seems to be an exploration of the dark, even fascistic side of the ‘degrowth’ movement. But rather than committing to a novel of ideas, Winton plumps instead for a more familiar human-centred story. The narrator carries out his missions mostly