Picador £16.99 pp319

A girl who loses half a finger to a hay baler, a child whose toes are lopped off by a power mower, a boy snagged on a hook, a swimmer savaged by a shark, two men with both legs broken, a battered wife, someone knocked through a window, sundry drug overdoses and self-harming alcoholics: as the tally of casualties in Tim Winton’s new collection of stories accumulates, it strikes you that he’d be in his element as writer in residence at an accident and emergency unit — or maybe a morgue (there are also three drownings, a double incineration, an electrocution, a mining fatality, deaths from cancer and meningitis, a lethal collision with a car and three suicides: by hanging, leaping into a pit and asphyxiation). Damage has always been Winton’s special subject (his breakthrough 1991 novel, Cloudstreet, began with one character losing four fingers and another suffering brain-injury). The 17 intensely striking stories in The Turning inspect it from various angles: physical, psychological, emotional, moral, social and domestic.

Covering three decades or so, they initially seem very diverse: some told in the first person, some in the third, one even in the second person. There are present-tense tales and past-tense ones. Characters under scrutiny can be men or women, young or old. Glimpsed externally in one story, someone can become the central consciousness in another. Different stories visit different phases of a single life. Gradually, they link and overlap into a portrait of an intricately intertangled community: Angelus, a small harbour town in Winton’s native western Australia.

This isn’t the first time he has surveyed this territory. His 1984 novel, Shallows, depicted clashes between conservationists and Angelus’s whaling industry. In The Turning, the whaling station with its grisly skinning deck and putrid stench of boiling blubber has become a thing of the past. The port is now a picturesque tourist destination, attracting visitors who like to watch the humpback whales majestically coursing towards the tropics. But, although things have looked up for cetaceans, human life in Angelus still quivers with vulnerability — as Winton grippingly displays.

Besides their concern with the myriad ways in which people can be damaged or cause damage, these stories share a fascination with turning points: moments when a life changes direction, a relationship irretrievably alters, a realisation dawns, a mood shifts, a resolve is made or broken. Capturing, with quick acuteness, ebbs and flows of feeling, oscillations of awareness, eddies of allegiance within families and social groups, they unroll a tough but never coarsened or callous view of life.

Exhilaratingly set against the often harsh insights is Winton’s keenly sensuous response to his coastal stretch of western Australia, with its dazzling white beaches and flamboyant vegetation. Tiger snakes and bluetongue lizards flicker through dense scrub. The scent of peppermint and eucalyptus wafts through air that sizzles with the sound of cicadas. By night, a “blizzard of stars” fills the vast sky.

Nothing is sentimentally beautified. When a boy, defying adult warnings, ventures into “the hissing maze” of a swamp, he slips to his death and “after the water settled back and shook itself smooth again like hung washing, there wasn’t a movement”. The laconic style, put to shock effect here, is also a prime resource for the deadpan humour that is such an enlivening feature of Winton’s stories. Auntie Cleo (who looks like “an old-timey movie star gone to fat”) “had cleavage that damn-near made an echo when she spoke”. A schoolfriend has “a face only a mother could love. One eye’s looking at you and the other eye’s looking for you”.

Beneath the immediate-impact surface robustness, these stories are threaded through with subtleties and oblique connections. For their masterly skills of organisation and perception to be fully appreciated, they need to be read more than once. But Winton’s writing — vigorous, vivid, precise — is so good that you’d want to do that anyway.

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