In fact, Lamb and Pickles don’t go together nearly as well as a counter-lunch. The Pickles are feckless, Sam spending his time courting ‘the hairy hand of God, otherwise known as Lady Luck’. It’s all he believes in, and mostly she fails him, with occasional comical and unlikely exceptions. The Lambs, on the other hand, have faith only in hard work; they set up a shop in their half of the house and seem to prosper, though it’s not particularly noticeable. Oriel, Lester’s wife, doesn’t believe in bad luck, she won’t stand for it. ‘We make good, Lester. We make war on the bad and don’t surrender’. She spends most of the book – when she’s not working day and night in the shop – living in a tent in the backyard. That’s her statement, though it’s not one anybody understands.

This is a long book, long in size and long in time, starting during the war, when the kids are small and following their growing up into parenthood themselves. It’s also large in intention. This is not just a matter of the time scheme, or the large cast of characters, nor is it simply the fact of its shape, which is picaresque and provides the themes of the novel. It is rather a question of meanings, which are not particularly naturalistic, but mystical and magical.

From the moment of Fish’s drowning, the idea of the river permeates the novel. It’s the Swan, on whose banks Perth is built. Winton calls it the beautiful the beautiful the river, and for those who don’t know the hymn from which this phrase comes he provides an epigraph:

Shall we gather at the river 
Where bright angel feet have trod

I kept remembering other lines:

Shall we gather at the river
The beautiful the beautiful the river
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God.

For anybody familiar with the hymn, it’s a powerful evocation; like the best of its kind it has a terrific tune which is capable of being sung with huge enthusiasm. And it has its origins in the hopes of a dispossessed people, who look to the next life for the joy that has escaped them in this – dispossessed people such as Fish, who has never quite forgiven his family for bringing him back to life again; his mother, who was the instrument, he has blotted out of existence. He saw his vision of bliss, was actually about to enter it, when he was cruelly dragged back to a lesser life, very much lesser in his case. Several times more he manages a moment of this vision, always he longs for it. In some ways Fish’s striving to find drowning again is the main story of the book. When he achieves it, we have a full expression of what is a number of times hinted at: that Fish, in some miraculously undamaged capacity, is the teller of the tale that is this novel.

The river is frequently a physical river, the actual Swan where you can swim and row boats and fish (which is important to Quick as pastime and livelihood, and also a kind of communion), a beloved presence that Winton celebrates: its beauty, the chant he makes of its suburbs, the pleasure it provides. In this form, it flows through all the book, and it really is the beautiful the beautiful the river. But it doesn’t remain a body of water, it takes on metaphysical dimensions. I’m not sure that the creation of the river as source or focus of mystical and indeed magical power really comes off, but what does work is the river as metaphor. As an image it is immensely strong.

There is no doubt that Winton can write marvellous prose. It’s full of energy, vitality, wit. It can offer wonder and delight. And in this novel it has set itself a difficult task, which is to write about people who are without language. They have their own brief crude dialect of carn and gunna and orright, of A man’d be hardly blamed for murderin that barsted in is sleep, which has plenty of vigour but no scope. When it needs to get beyond abuse and barney and trivial daily detail, it becomes clumsy and hard to believe, like Quick asking his father: So what ... what dyou live for?

Because he’s writing about people who are inarticulate, slow­witted, untrained in thinking (Rose, he tells us, is an exception, but he shows no evidence of this – she acts from gut feeling or a mystical sense of rightness as much as anyone) and essentially languageless, Winton has to do it all for them. He can’t ever narrate anything involving thought rather than mystery through their own perceptions. He has to tell us about it.

This is perhaps what makes his characters at best archetypes and at worst stereotypes, living out certain myths of the Australian psyche, living through physical horrors such as seeing a family burnt to death or a schoolmate run over by a train, or psychological ones such as discovering your father is your grandfather and your mother your sister, but not learning, changing, developing. It is to go on spiritual journeys whose end is to see the light that was always there, rather than to grow one within yourself.

On the other hand, he does develop a rather spectacular prose in which to do all the telling he has made necessary. It’s a kind of Australian Dylan Thomas of Under Milkwood shading in and out of the Bible, which allows for lovely rhythms and images that catch the heart and mind.

This is Fish in miraculous narrator mode talking to his brother Quick; it’s a good bit to quote because it catches the preoccupations and the strengths as well as some of the weaknesses of the novel:

Sleep, Quick, and smell the water leaching. Can’t you hear the boy in the boxboat calling? I’m calling, brotherboy, and you won’t come.

And the waters shall fall from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up. And they shall turn the rivers far away and the brooks of defence shall be emptied and dried up: the reeds and flags shall wither, be driven away, and be no more. The fishers also shall mourn, and all they that cast angle into the brooks shall lament, and they that spread nets upon the waters shall languish. From me to you, the river. In me and you, the river. Of me and you, the river. Carn, Quick!

Winton’s use of verbs is very Dylan Thomas, and he exploits the opportunities they offer for a naïve vernacular poetry that is full of energy and insight and a delight in the putting of things into words for their own sake. And, of course, it’s frequently very funny (though I’m not sure how comical I found a Pentecostal pig who talks in tongues) in his constant irreverence and cutting-down-to-size.

There’s also plenty of sex and violence, and a dwelling on masculine pursuits. Sometimes the language is cruel; Winton looks at his characters with a cold, detached eye and is never squeamish in his similes: ‘she goes down the stairs arse over, slopping more than she thumps, like a bag of yesterday’s fish’. This kind of nastiness towards his characters I found unpleasant; there’s no trace of love in it, and indeed despite its claims I often found this a loveless novel.

In conclusion … well, I don’t want to come to one. It’s a long sprawling book, some will say too long. Others will enjoy its largeness, even wallow in it, and not consider whether it could have done what it does in less space. Not want it to have done it in less. It is crammed full of excellent things, and some odd ones, and certainly, though these won’t be the same for everybody, some unsympathetic ones, and each reader will decide for herself what it is they all amount to, and how much to admire its large achievement.