Unfortunately Sam Pickles is an inveterate gambler, always believing that the next horse he bets on will deliver him a fortune. The money should have been enough to keep the Pickles family comfortably well off for many years. The windfall came at a low point in his life - he’d recently lost the fingers on one hand in a fishing accident, limiting his options for employment. It’s a large ramshackle building, a “great continent” of a house inherited by Sam Pickles along with a cash bequest of £2000.

Both families leave their rural homes as a result of personal tragedies, ending up sharing Number 1 Cloudstreet in a suburb of Perth, Western Australia. Nor can I vouch for the authenticity and accuracy of Winton’s portrayal of life in a particular period of time - roughly speaking, from the end of WW2 to the early sixties.įortunately, unlike thousands of Australian schoolchildren faced with Winton’s award-winning novel, I could just enjoy the book and not worry too much about its status in the canon of literature.Ĭloudstreet offers us a portrait of two working class families: the Pickles and the Lambs. The introduction to my edition actually goes one step further - Philip Hensher calls Cloudstreet “A Great Australian Novel”that “speaks for a nation” by showing its contradictions and complexities.Īs a geographic outsider I’m not the best reader to judge whether such bold claims are warranted. The novel is often extremely black farce, but that could be a reason for more serious naming.Type “Cloudstreet” into a search engine and you’ll see it described over and over again as a classic of Australian fiction. Rose Pickles: I suppose it’s a statement. There’s Fish Lamb and his brother Quick (because he’s slow), their sisters Elaine, Hat, and Red in comparison, the Pickles are treated mildly: they’re Dolly, Chub, and Ted, with sister Rose.

And this is probably the place for me to mention my doubts about the characters’ names I don’t see why they need to be ludicrous. ‘Lamb and Pickles,’ guffaws Sam, ‘It’s gunna sound like a counter lunch.’ Since Tim Winton is writing it, that is presumably his intention. The two families come to live together in a vast rambling mansion in Perth which gives the book its title: it’s in Cloud Street. He is resuscitated, but too late his brain is damaged. The Lamb family, on the other hand, believed in God rather than luck, until their son Fish (short for Samsonfish, Samson being his given name) drowns while prawning in the river. He goes to work and loses his fingers in a winch: when he takes his glove off, they ‘fell to the deck and danced like half a pound of live prawns’. What do you do when you wake up in the morning and feel the shifty shadow of God lurking? You stay in bed, and hope that it’ll pass you by, that’s what.

Cloud street tim winton