They are characters who become as familiar to us as the rest of this bunch – Dolly with her sharp edged, quite intelligent potty mouth Rose, fired by her desire to be normal, better, different from her mother Oriel, who subsumes her sense of failure and guilt into a Quaker style of hard work and care or Quick, who is drawn, masochistically, to the misery of others. Implicitly, like the way we know anyone we’ve lived with, loved, been irritated or hurt by, hated, and loved again. Even the dead fail to know and that’s what hurts the most. You can only imagine and still fail to grab at how it must be. Not the way all the living are stuck in time and space he’s in another stuckness altogether. It could be the ghosts who inhabit the house they live in, or the nature of the tragedies that befall both families, leaving two of the key characters – Sam and Fish – both present and absent at the same time – life and death magically mingling in their veins: While Rose Pickles tilts towards ‘normalcy’, these people are all special in one way or another, even with their idiosyncrasies and failings – there is something extraordinary, even magical about them. Both families are at the periphery of society, like the house itself. Both are galvanised around their families. Both have had their lives altered by terrible accidents involving the sea. The families have more in common than they might appear to though. The Lambs are hard working, upstanding people who transform their half of the house into a successful shop through hard work and an enterprising spirit. Sam and Dolly Pickles are gamblers – they drink, smoke, curse, Sam loses huge amounts of money on the horses, Dolly sleeps around, and aside from renting out half of the place to the Lambs, they do nothing to improve Cloudstreet’s ramshackled appearance. These families couldn’t be more different. The story follows, in a reasonably simple manner, the Pickles and the Lambs – who end up living in the same large, somewhat haunted house, #1 Cloudstreet, inherited by Sam Pickles. Like Winton himself, there is something so humble about the book-it’s such a soft, generous offering-that it’s almost difficult to reconcile the honesty of the story-the lives of these two flawed families-with the fireworks that it creates in terms of its illumination of the human condition. How do you begin to write about a book like Cloudstreet? It’s so fine, subtle and perfectly written that the reader is carried forward on the plot before he or she even realises that the book has had a transformative effect.
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