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
Beta“Big World,” “Abbreviation,” and “Aquifer”
“Big World” Summary
The story begins in the small whaling town of Angelus, Western Australia in the early 1980s, right after the narrator and his friend Biggie Botson have graduated from high school. Most of the people from their class have gone on to college, but the two boys are working at a meat-packing plant and saving up for a car. The narrator is sick of waiting and wants to escape Angelus, so he convinces Biggie to buy a kombi (a VW van). They drive east together, intending to make it past Perth before letting anyone know they’re gone.
The narrator has failed his exams and is upset that he won’t be attending university. Biggie failed too, but he is content with his station in life, which is a point of frustration between the narrator and his mother: she thinks Biggie is holding her son back, and the narrator’s visions of the future don’t include Biggie in them, even though Biggie has been the narrator’s best friend ever since Biggie saved him from Tony Macoli, a bully who wouldn’t leave him alone. Since then, the narrator has tried to help Biggie do better in school, to his own detriment. Now, though, Biggie has become a burden, particularly when it comes to the narrator’s relationships with women.
The two of them pick up a hitchhiker named Meg who is “thick as a box of hammers” (11). The narrator finds her annoying, but Biggie is in love. The narrator is troubled by the fact that Biggie finally has someone to lord himself over, and even more troubled that he sees himself in this behavior. This is what the narrator is thinking about when the van catches fire. They pull over and watch the van smolder, and the story moves into the future, with the narrator discussing Biggie’s death in a mining accident in a year, and Tony Macoli becoming a wealthy banker, and himself seeing a girl he liked at the grocery store and not knowing what all the fuss was about, “All of it unimaginable” (14). The three of them watch the sunset, and “the world gets big around [them], so big [they] just give in and watch” (15).
“Abbreviation” Summary
On the last day of the year in 1973, Vic Lang, a young teenager from Angelus, visits White Point with his extended family for a beach vacation. There is some tension on the first day, as Vic’s Uncle Eddie was “a live wire, an adventurer. […] Vic’s father, on the other hand, was the one who tidied up after the excitement” (22).
Vic goes swimming alone and realizes he is being watched by a young woman. A wave knocks him over, and his swim trunks come off, which the woman finds funny. He approaches her and realizes that she is several years older than him. While they talk, he also realizes she is missing a finger and asks if it hurt. “‘Like a total bastard,’ she said. ‘But, you know, all the big things hurt, the things you remember’” (26). Then she pinches his ear as hard as she can and kisses him. They walk back together and she tells him her name is Melanie.
That evening, Vic sneaks over to Melanie’s camp, which seems a lot more fun than his own. He and Melanie talk away from the others. When Vic asks Melanie why she seems sad, she says it’s because she’s going back to the farm instead of back to school. Then she puts a finger over his mouth, and they kiss. Things progress, and when he kisses her breast, she begins to cry. Vic realizes that “she was in some kind of pain, something important that was out of his reach, the way everything is when you’re just a stupid kid and all the talk is over your head” (33).
The next morning, Vic goes fishing with his father and Uncle. The ocean is rougher than they expect, and Vic is thrown overboard and tangled up in the line with a hook embedded in his calf. Vic’s father rescues him and the two men get Vic to shore. As Vic has the hook taken out of him, he thinks of Melanie. He goes to give the hook to Melanie, as “[she] would understand; she’d know what he meant by it” (35). She’s gone, though; rain is on the way, which means her family has to go back to the farm. He stands there on the beach, his hopes dashed, feeling empty.
“Aquifer” Summary
A first-person narrator who lives in Angelus is watching TV and sees that the police have pulled bones (“four femurs and a skull”) from a lake (37). He recognizes it as the aquifer from his hometown and returns in a daze. When he first moved there with his family he was just a boy, and the town was new, a suburb that was right on the outskirts of the wilderness. The neighborhood boys played in the swamp, and after some resistance, the narrator did too.
One boy, Alan Mannering, is cruel to the narrator, even going so far as to urinate all around him while he is asleep. When Alan and the narrator are at the swamp alone, Alan slips from his makeshift boat and drowns, and the narrator does nothing. After this, the neighborhood starts to develop, and the story documents this progress through new families, the building of an aquifer, and notably the way people use groundwater once water restrictions caused by a drought begin. Through all this, Alan’s death stays with the narrator, as he is unable to cope with the memory and his lack of action.
When he arrives back at his old neighborhood, he drives around, seeing how much it’s changed and thinking that someone will know, somehow, that he witnessed Alan’s death. The neighborhood has become nice, “Middle class, [he supposes], which is a shock until you realize that everyone’s middle class in this country now. Except for the unemployed and the dead” (52). When the narrator sees that one of his old neighbors, the Aboriginal Joneses, are in the process of being evicted, he realizes that progress is not a straight line, and that “things are never over” (53).
“Big World,” “Abbreviation,” and “Aquifer” Analysis
The opening stories of this linked collection have two distinct goals: “Big World” and “Aquifer” set the tone and establish themes that will recur throughout the book, and “Abbreviation” introduces the reader to Vic Lang and begins an intense character study of one man living through the decades of decline of both his family and his community. In a linked story collection like this one, small details or minor characters in one story can have a big impact elsewhere, and the cross-cutting between the Lang family and other town figures (and figures in neighboring communities) is an important piece of understanding the work as a whole.
In many ways, Biggie and the narrator of “Big World” are emblematic of all of Angelus. The narrator dreams of escape but sees himself as weighed down by his friendship to Biggie, who has little ambition and is content with his post-high school life. The narrator fails his exams in part because he is helping Biggie with his own schoolwork, and this connection even extends to him curbing relationships with women he’s attracted to. It’s only when the two of them leave in the van that the narrator is able to see all of this, as well as his own complicity in negative parts of the friendship: when they pick up Meg, the narrator says “something else, the thing that eats at me, is the way he’s enjoying being brighter than her […] It’s how I am with him and it’s not pretty” (13). He starts to realize that their friendship is built on a power imbalance that he’s not comfortable with.
There’s a telling duality that takes place between two images in the story: on the last night of school, at a bonfire (the same bonfire that will feature in “Boner McPharlin’s Moll”), the narrator sees “a kite in the air and its tail was on fire, looping and spiraling orange and pink against the night sky,” and then, at the end of the story, the image of their own van burning. When the narrator thinks “The fact that the burning kite consumed its own tail and fluttered down into the sea didn’t really register,” it’s symbolic of his own trajectory in life, but he fails to see this connection at the end, as he ends the story in a kind of euphoria about how big the world is and his place in it, despite the fact that he’s now dealing with a more direct kind of stranding than the one he faced in his dead-end life in Angelus (12).
The stories that focus on a young Vic Lang similarly show the character unable to see the big picture, and “Abbreviation” is no different in this regard: though he can see that Melanie is sad, his immaturity coupled with his focus on his own concerns keep him from understanding why. In this story, Vic has yet to experience the crippling anxiety that is coming for him in later parts of his life, but a pattern begins here that plays out again and again in Vic’s narrative: Vic is forced into an adult situation before he is really ready for it, and the disconnect between his experience and his understanding is where the tension lies in his character. In this case, his sexual encounter with Melanie is a positive experience, but she’s clearly more mature than he, both in age and in outlook. Of her missing finger, she says, “[…] all the big things hurt, the things you remember. If it doesn’t hurt it’s not important” (26).
When Vic is injured in the fishing accident, he thinks that he’s earned his way to that kind of understanding, but Melanie is gone by then, and he doesn’t get a chance to tell her so. However, he hasn’t really learned the lesson. Melanie was talking about more than just the injury; she was talking about the disappointment of her life as a farmer when she wants something more, and the severing of her ring finger is symbolic of that existential pain.
“Abbreviation” also introduces us to Vic’s larger family dynamic, and in particular the dynamic of his father, Bob Lang, as the steady going brother to Uncle Ernie. Vic is at the age where he finds his family embarrassing—his cousins are awkward and ugly, his aunt and uncle are carousing drunks, his grandmother is controlling, and his mother fusses over him. This contrasts with his outsider’s view of Melanie’s camp, which Vic watches jealously but Melanie wryly mocks as “a peasant’s feast” (30). Vic’s family is going to shift drastically as the book continues on, but his obsession with his own place in it and in the wider world will continue to be a dominant part of his character.
One of the narrative goals of this book is to zoom out from the Lang family and look at the macrocosm of Western Australia during this time so that the reader can get a picture of the way society is interconnected, and the suburban town in “Aquifer” serves as an interesting counterpoint to Angelus, which is where most of the action takes place. Whereas Angelus is in decline, the suburb that the narrator of “Aquifer” returns to is on the rise, with the wilderness being pushed further back as neighborhoods become middle class. When he lived there as a boy, the children played in the swamp, and Aboriginal and immigrant neighbors were common, but by the time he returns to revisit his conflicted feelings about witnessing Alan Mannering’s death, the last people he knows are being evicted.
It’s important to note that the Joneses are Aboriginal, and that the same race and class struggles that occur in Angelus also happen here in the suburbs. The story asks hard questions about the nature of progress, which the narrator contends isn’t the straight line he thought it was but “comes and goes in waves and folds like water […] When a wave breaks, the water is not moving” (52). For the narrator, water is a symbol of the immutability of history: when the water everyone drinks from comes from a swamp that has dead bodies in it, there’s no escaping the history of a place, as much as concepts of progress try to ignore that.
Related Titles
By Tim Winton
