AN OPEN SWIMMER
Tim Winton
Penguin

Jerra’s family want him to make something of himself. A girl and a job would be a good start.

But Jerra is tormented by secret memories – thoughts that beach themselves like broken shells caught in the tide wrack of an uneasy sexual awakening and a sense that he has betrayed those he loves.

On a bleak southern shoreline in Western Australia, Jerra meets an old codger whose conscience is as tortured as his own. Unable to confess or forgive, they find an ancient law/hope hovering in their mutilated lives: a single witness shall not stand…

Jerra, Jeremy, Jeremiah: identity ebbs and flows as Winton’s first novel offers up a stormsurge of images. His prose is like flotsam spinning by, eddying back, washing up in mysterious nuanced shapes of sometimes spare, sometimes lyrical scenes.

Jerra’s search for self becomes a quest to find the legendary pearl in the brain cavity of a King fish. Whatever the cost. ‘What are you? Gotta mutilate fish to find what you want? Why don’t you hack yourself open?’ Invisibly to all around him, even to the old man who understands him better than anyone else, this is exactly what Jerra is doing to his soul. His poetry changes from images of lost love to severed men.

Undercurrents of Biblical allusion glimmer through the book – the Mosaic law code; the fleeting identification of Jerra with Jeremiah, the weeping prophet; the sense that the mystical pearl of the open swimmer – the King fish – is really the Pearl of Great Price and that forgiveness that will enable Jerra to integrate his scarred, torn life.

An Open Swimmer was the winner of the 1981 Australian/Vogel Award.

Over it all slants the long shadow of the gospel, still tantalisingly out of reach.