Jack Batty PES English Dr. Strangeways
ClOUDSTREET
By Tim Winton
The title, Cloudstreet, although a bit plain, couldn’t be more appropriately named as everything that happens within the story revolves around the house nicknamed Cloudstreet. Winton sets this book around Perth, Western Australia, around the time of the second end of the Second World War over a span of twenty years. From reading other Winton novels it’s easy to see that his part of the country has had a big impact on him and he has a strong affinity with his country and me being from the West makes it easy for me to relate to the novel. Winton uses words that only someone who has had the experience of growing up or living in country Western Australia would understand, for example he uses the word “boondie” which, if you had lived in country western Australia, is word used to describe a clump of hard sand and you use it to throw it at people, “boondie wars” and because he doesn’t explain this to the reader it gave me a little smile on my face and made me feel I had some sort of relationship with the author.
Before Chapter One opens there are about two pages of prologue. Winton sets the prologue on the bank of a river; a big happy family picnic is taking place in what he describes as a very picturesque scene, “Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the waters edge.” The prologue is written from the view of a narrator though it was hard to figure that out, for in the first few lines it says, “will you look at us by the river!” this makes it sound like its written in first person but later it Winton writes, “He hears nothing but the water.” And he goes into detail with what the character is feeling but still uses words like, “he” making it sound like the view of a narrator. The effect that writing in the view of someone outside the family creates is like you are there watching in all this “skylarking” and “chiacking” going on and it is a very nice image to be reading. Later into the prologue someone runs to the water of the river, this is written much like the beginning, very happy and a scene that if you saw on television you’d expect to see it all in slow motion with a very merry tune in the background. The author writes, “He’s running… with his big overripe man’s body quivering with happiness.” And though someone’s body quivering is not generally a pretty sight, the context and the way that Winton writes it makes sound happy. The prologue is a very nice way to start the novel; it fills your mind with content thoughts and images, it makes you want to get into the novel. The stuff that occurs in a prologue generally happen throughout the novel and I found when reading there were parts that my mind would click and I would remember something from the prologue, this has a great effect on the reader and it made me want to keep on reading it even more. Through the whole prologue Winton doesn’t introduce any character and the only person we see remains nameless, this leaves the reader in suspense and makes them even more curious. Though the prologue may sound like a very pleasant part of the book and on one level it is, though later in the novel I learnt that the prologue is about a character called Fish, a retarded boy, drowning himself in the river. This is not made clear in the prologue and I think that Winton doesn’t make this obvious for a few reasons, I think that he does this to not turn off a reader from the book, for a happy start is more likely to captivate a reader than a sad one, also he does it so that you get that big realisation later in the novel and also with this realisation the prologue shows a different point of view on the matter, showing that Fish’s death is not as dreadful as it may seem.
