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.
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Beta“Long, Clear View,” “Reunion,” “Commission,” and “Fog”
“Long, Clear View” Summary
This second-person point of view story centers on Vic and his family when they are new to the city of Angelus. Vic is having trouble fitting in and has become very anxious, and when he is alone in the house he goes to hold onto the rifle that his father keeps unloaded. His father, a police officer who is new to Angelus (and who will soon abandon the family, as is revealed in other stories), keeps the breech-bolt hidden, and Vic doesn’t go near it, though he knows where it is.
There’s news around school about a kid who was recently expelled and has been questioned by the cops, and students are asking Vic about it, which helps him start to feel like he fits in. At the same time, Vic’s father seems clouded and distracted at home. Then, at a school dance, a student turns up dead in the bathroom, and soon after another person is found hanging in their bedroom. Suddenly, Vic sees trouble everywhere, and he becomes aware of the way his father’s job puts him in the middle of all the trouble, though it is unclear if the town is really becoming more violent or if Vic is seeing what was already there. When he sees his father at the police picnic, he realizes his father doesn’t belong.
His father’s mood changes, and he is home less often and clearly hiding something. Then he is transferred to another precinct temporarily, and he tells Vic that he has to take care of his mother and to keep away from the wharf. The cops in Angelus have arranged for prison laborers to come help around the house, which Vic convinces his mother to stop. Still, police cruise by every night, and Vic thinks someone is hanging around in the garden at night. Something is clearly going on, but Vic doesn’t know what it is. Vic begins to take the rifle bolt out of its hiding place and examine it.
Vic’s dog becomes ill, and the vet says he’s constipated. Vic sleeps in the laundry room with the dog that night, and when he wakes the dog is dead. His mother can’t get an answer from the vet, and she leaves to go to the precinct. She leaves Vic in charge, and he puts the bolt in the rifle and waits at the window, thinking “You’re not sure what to look for but you know you have to be ready. From here you have a long, clear view. Responsibility is on you now, formless and as implacable as gravity” (204).
“Reunion” Summary
The story takes place on Christmas day, and Vic’s wife Gail (who is the unnamed narrator of “Abbreviation”) is celebrating with her husband and her mother-in-law Carol. Carol reveals that her brother-in-law Ernie has invited them over, which is strange: since Vic’s father disappeared, his family has shunned Carol and Vic.
They decide to go, and on the drive Gail thinks about the coldness she’s always felt from Carol. They arrive at the house, and Carol doesn’t recognize anything, but they attribute it to the time that has passed and go around back to the pool. There’s no one home, and while they’re looking, Carol trips and falls into the pool. They all burst into laughter, and Gail jumps in after her. Vic is about to jump in too when he thinks that they might be at the wrong house. He’s right, and as they hurry into the car and drive off, they see Ernie and his friends in a driveway down the street.
Back home, Gail and Carol bond over the ridiculousness of the situation and share champagne. Gail talks about her poor childhood and her strict, religious parents, and Vic becomes agitated about it. The two women acknowledge that Vic has to protect everyone. Gail and Carol ignore Vic, and for the first time, Gail feels like the two are growing closer.
“Commission” Summary
Vic Lang’s mother Carol, who is dying of cancer, has asked him to go find his estranged, alcoholic father Bob Lang so she can see him one last time. Vic dreads going, as he hasn’t seen his father in 27 years, but he drives out to his father’s last known address, a pub in the Western Australia bush country. The bar owner directs Vic to a shack far away from civilization, and Vic drives out there to find his father, who is now sober. His father knows immediately that it is about Carol, and agrees to come back with Vic.
While his father prepares to go, Vic inspects his home and life. His father is living in a single spare room and has been sober for fifteen years; he’s known as Bob the Banker, because he makes his living serving as a go-between for prospectors, and is seen as a trustworthy person. Vic thinks bitterly about this, as his father’s abandonment has left him with trust issues that he has been dealing with all his life.
The two have a terse conversation that eventually leads to Bob’s leaving and eventual sobriety. Vic realizes that the reason his mother has asked to see Bob is so that Vic would be forced to face him, too. Vic asks why Bob left, and says it must have had something to do with his job as a policeman. There is a royal commission (a formal Australian government investigation of the highest order) underway that is investigating police abuses of power, and Bob says that he saw things, which is what drove him to drink. He felt like the only person not involved, but he also couldn’t leave the job, as being a cop was the only thing he knew. He says, “Cowardice, it’s a way of life. It’s not natural, you learn it” (231). Vic believes him.
Vic asks how his father got sober, and he says he went to one meeting and saw how pathetic everyone was, which was all it took. He went out into the bush to be alone and possibly kill himself, and then he realized he’d been six months without alcohol, and decided to live. The conversation ends there, and Vic spend the night in his father’s bed while his father sleeps on the floor. When he awakes, he sees his father holding onto his cashbox “which he held like a man entrusted” (233).
“Fog” Summary
“Fog” centers on Bob Lang while he is still a rookie police officer in Angelus. He is beginning to suspect that something is going on around him, as his fellow officers stop speaking when he comes in the room, and he has an uneasy feeling at work, which has led him to start drinking on the job. Bob gets a call that some hikers have gotten lost, and he drives out to the search area to assist. Bob takes a team of volunteers out looking, and he is paired up with a young woman, Marie, who is a journalist on her first assignment. This makes him anxious, as he feels he has something to prove.
While the two of them are in a thicket away from the rest of the volunteers, the radio is damaged. The light is fading, and they decide to rest a moment before heading back. Marie hears a sound, and they agree that it is the missing hiker. They go further into the wilderness and find the man with his legs broken. Bob tries to convince Marie to go back to the trail and get the others, but she’s afraid she’ll get lost in the darkness. Frustrated, Bob thinks of taking a drink from the brandy he’s kept in his pocket, but realizes that the girl is a journalist, and it would be a scandal. He looks at the bottle, thinking “The need, the shame, the awful fact of it glinting in the meagre light” before throwing it into the wilderness (244).
With it fully dark, Bob and Marie realize they’re stuck spending the night with the wounded man. Marie is upset that they’ve found him but can’t help, and Bob says, “Exactly,” knowing that kind of thing comes with the job. Marie thinks she should be tougher, but Bob says she’s doing fine, and then tells her the story of a kid who was messing around on his bike to impress some girls and ended up getting hit by a car. Bob tells her about having to wait for help with the boy while everyone watched, expecting him to do something, and then having to go tell the boy’s parents after he died. He almost starts to tell her about the other things he’s seen, and the corruption he suspects at the department, but she starts to cry, and he realizes she’s still just a kid.
The two of them are forced to spend the night huddled against the wounded man for warmth, and Bob realizes he won’t say anything after all, because “It was what he’s best at now. When you’ve lost your pride there’s nothing left to say” (249). He lays there, waiting for morning, when he knows they’ll be rescued and everything will be okay for Marie, who will have a great story, which Bob bitterly knows won’t be the truth.
“Long, Clear View,” “Reunion,” “Commission,” and “Fog” Analysis
The narrative tension of each of these stories feed into one another, as the mystery of what happened with Bob Lang is introduced in “Long, Clear View,” touched upon in the adult life of Vic with his wife Gail and mother Carol in “Reunion,” and revealed in full in “Commission.” “Fog” winds back the clock of the narrative and looks at the same time as “Long, Clear View” from Bob’s perspective, allowing the reader access to the perils of Angelus that Vic isn’t able to see when he’s a young man and still doesn’t reckon with as an adult except in the abstract.
The second person of “Long, Clear View” gives the story an intimacy and a sense of the anxiety that Vic Lang feels: he has no agency in the things that are happening around him, and the imperative “you” amplifies that feeling. Through this, the story is able to bring the reader into the paranoia that Vic is experiencing without breaking his child’s perspective. To Vic, “The job, the town, the transfer, everything’s off somehow,” but he is never able to see the problem more clearly than that, even as his home life becomes more ominous and his father slips out of his life (189).
This trajectory can be traced by Vic’s relationship with a powerful symbol in the story: his father’s .22 rifle. At the beginning of the story, when Vic is left alone he goes and gets the rifle for a sense of security, but he “know[s] all about firearm safety” and never retrieves the ammo or breech bolt. After he is convinced that something dangerous is lurking around him, which has something to do with his father and the violence around town, he starts retrieving the breech bolt, and he thinks that it’s okay as long as he doesn’t assemble the weapon. By the end of the story, when his father is absent, his dog has died mysteriously, and his mother has left him alone guarding his sister, he is fully overtaken by his sense of dread, and assembles the weapon, because “responsibility is on [him] now, formless and implacable as gravity” (204). In Angelus, and in Vic’s life, moving into adulthood means being ready to grapple with coming violence, and even though Vic ultimately escapes that fate, the trauma of this time has lingering effects on him.
“Reunion” is a much lighter story that takes place well into Vic’s adulthood, and is concerned with Gail’s relationship to her mother-in-law Carol. In the context of the other stories that feature these characters, Gail trying to connect with Carol might seem unimportant, but there’s a dramatic irony at work here—not long after, Carol will be diagnosed with cancer, bringing Bob and the trauma of abandonment back into the story. The undercurrent that Gail “has no purchase” with Carol is rooted in the fact that Carol and Vic had to be on their own for so long, and Carol’s identity is rooted in motherhood since Bob left her. Vic, too, is clearly haunted, as he gets visibly upset when Gail talks of the injustices in her own childhood. Ultimately, this story is a moment of respite for these characters, as Gail and Carol connect for the first time.
“Commission” tells the story of Vic Lang going to find Bob, who has been living in functional exile for twenty-seven years. In “Damaged Goods,” the reader learns that Bob will come to stay by Carol’s side for two days before returning to the bush to fall down an open mine shaft, which colors the steadfast, resigned character of Bob Lang in this story. He has spent his life since leaving as a trustworthy member of the small prospecting community he’s found, and facing his son and dying wife is clearly too much to bear.
There’s a parallel between Bob’s life and the royal commission that’s happening in the background of this story, which is based on the Kennedy Royal Commission of 2002-2004. Australia has a long history of mistreatment of Aborigine populations and police corruption, and Bob bore witness to this behavior—his familial guilt and his professional guilt are inextricably linked, and when confronted about the commission, he says “It’s a long time ago. […] It’s a shame to get this car dirty” (227). Bob Lang has survived what he’s seen and what he’s done through avoidance, and the story demonstrates how damaging that is to both a person and a nation. The morning that they leave for home, Vic sees his father: “His swag was rolled and on his knee was a battered cashbox which he held like a man entrusted” (233). It’s a beautiful image that underscores the pain of cowardice that Bob has been carrying for so long.
“Fog” shows Bob Lang as a young officer, and the job is already starting to take a toll on him. He’s assigned all the grunt work, and he’s becoming more and more certain that corruption is rampant in his department, though he doesn’t have enough evidence to do anything about it. The young journalist, Marie, is a contrast to him: she’s optimistic and can barely contain her excitement at being sent out on assignment, whereas Bob sees the search and rescue as commonplace and even drudgery. When they become trapped in the wilderness together overnight, unable to help the hurt man, Marie begins to despair, and Bob sees his own disillusionment playing out again. This is what drives him to tell her about watching the young boy die, saying, “I was talking to him. He knew why we were waiting. There wasn’t a mark on him. […] And then I had to walk up the hill to tell his parents” (247). Bob thinks he has found a confidant, but she can’t bear it, and he realizes that he’s all alone in the work he does, and that he’ll have no one to talk to about any of it.
In this story, Bob is torn between being the good policeman and giving in to drink, and the night he spends in the woods with Marie and the injured hiker puts a fine point on the issue. For Bob, there will be no escape, and all the damage that is coming for his family as a result is inevitable.
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