76 pages • 2 hours read
Tim WintonThe Turning
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summary
Story Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Quiz
Tools
BetaThemes
The Sins of the Father
Bob Lang abandoning his family is the centerpiece of The Turning, and the family dynamic that springs from that act—a repeating pattern of guilt, anxiety, and silence that Vic first experiences with his mother and then his wife—drives much of the narrative tension of the Lang stories. Vic’s character is shaped by his father’s actions, first as a young man, when his father’s inability to confront the injustice at his work leads him to destructive alcoholism, and later as an adult, when his desire to correct his father’s mistakes makes him an overly protective husband, son, and lawyer. It is only after he confronts his father that Vic is able to begin healing.
The tension between father and child figures in most of the other family dynamics in the book. Agnes Larwood can’t bear who her once-alcoholic father has become and Brakey’s father has run off in “Cockleshell.” Max and Frank’s relationship in “Sand” and “Family” is built on the lack of love they experience from their father, leading them to focus their emotional energy on each other in destructive ways. Boner McPharlin’s father was an abusive, vicious man who cared little for his son. In The Turning, the fathers who stay with their families visit trauma on their children in the way of alcoholism and violence, and the fathers who leave create an absence that cannot be accounted for.
Confronting and overcoming childhood is a classic storytelling trope, and the stories here couple that with a contemporary understanding of inherited trauma. Bob Lang’s disappearance and eventual reappearance creates a point of arrested development for Vic; everything about Vic as an adult character—from his fighting injustice to his anxiety to his not having children of his own—can be read as a reaction to Bob Lang, and there is a strong Freudian element to how fathers are presented as obstacles that must be defeated/overcome by their children. The overarching narrative of the book insists that, in order for growth to happen, a reckoning with the past is required.
Adolescent Obsession
In many of the stories in The Turning, the main character (often Vic Lang) is driven by an adolescent fascination with girls that borders on the unhealthy. In “Abbreviation,” Vic is taken with Melanie, a young woman with a missing ring finger; in “Damaged Goods,” it’s Strawberry Alison, who has a birthmark on her face, that commands Vic’s attention; and in “Cockleshell,” Brakey follows Agnes Larwood around. An inversion of this theme happens in “Boner McPharlin’s Moll,” as Jackie is the one who obsesses over Boner at first in a way that is similar to Vic and Brakey. These obsessions drive their own stories and are touched upon and influence the events of other stories in the book.
In each of these cases, the object of obsession is just that: an object. They are rarely empathized with, and are often watched from afar, almost voyeuristically. The young women are objects of sexual desire, but there’s also an undercurrent of sadness to each of them that the characters obsessing over them struggle to understand, and that further complicates the desire felt. The stories cast typical teenage hormones in a more nuanced light; instead of being just about a nascent understanding of sex, these obsessions deal with a yearning that the characters aren’t mature enough to articulate even as they keenly experience it. Melanie’s and Alison’s disfigurement, Alison’s hidden sexuality, and Agnes Larwood’s sad upbringing are part of the allure for these young men, and there is ultimately a disconnect between the tragedy these young women are experiencing and the lack of tragedy in the boys’ lives that drives the obsession.
Ultimately, the young men cannot empathize with the women they are drawn to, but it’s not for a lack of trying. The women are dealing with issues that are far above the boy’s maturity level, and obsessing over them drives the boys toward a loss of innocence and an understanding of the tragedy that is coming for them.
The Influence of Class and Race
Angelus is a town in decline, and that has devastating effects on the families in The Turning. Social and economic class are a constant point of tension in these stories, sometimes bubbling under the surface, and at other times driving the narrative forward. The most obvious example is the way that the economic decline of Angelus in the early 1980s leads to the introduction of crime, drugs, and police corruption, all of which have massive effects on the lives of the characters. It’s important to note the way the stories demonstrate that personal trauma and the pressures of class are interconnected—for example, the Lang family’s central trauma of being abandoned by Bob Lang is driven by his experience dealing with crime and corruption, which in turn leaves Vic and his mother struggling financially and too busy surviving to process their grief.
Class consciousness is a central component of many of the stories. In “On Her Knees,” Vic grapples with his mother’s pride in being a good housekeeper while he is becoming upwardly mobile; the mother in “Cockleshell” thinks herself above the Larwoods even though the two families are neighbors struggling with broken homes; the economic realities of farming cut short Melanie’s vacation in “Abbreviation,” implying that the meaning that Vic is seeking in a connection with her is something working class families don’t have time for; Raelene thinks she deserves to live in a van and be abused even as she sees her friends living the a comfortable, happy life in “The Turning.” In each of these instances, barriers of class lead to barriers of understanding.
Though not as prevalent, race is another major factor at work in the stories. Like much of Australia, Western Australia has a fraught history of dealing with immigrant and Aborigine populations, and the police corruption in Angelus is based in part on historical incidents of police mistreatment of these groups. Often, the discrimination that these groups face either goes unnoticed entirely by the characters in The Turning or is misinterpreted or uncomprehended (in part because of the de facto segregation that these characters live in).
In “Aquifer,” for example, the narrator happens upon his Aboriginal neighbors being evicted, which leads him to ruminate on the nature of progress without articulating the truth: his old neighbors are likely being evicted because they are seen as undesirable or have been driven out by a now middle-class neighborhood. What he sees as an emblem of the artificiality of progress is also an example of the harm of gentrification. The final story in the collection finally brings this issue fully to the surface: Vic Lang begins the story by remarking that the Aboriginal kids he played basketball with as a young man wanted to be walked home because “[he thinks] they were afraid of the dark or maybe something they had to walk past” without realizing that the kids were afraid of violence and harassment, sometimes at the hands of the police (300). By the end of the story, he is beginning to understand his father’s and his own complicity in Angelus’ racism.
Related Titles
By Tim Winton
