Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Turning, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Memory
Family, Violence, and Love
Addiction
Belonging and Escape
Regret and Forgiveness
Summary
Analysis
Vic and Gail are driving up into a valley on country roads, past vineyards and trees. Gail is driving, while Vic is resting on pillows; both of them are escaping the house for the first time in a while. Vic starts to reminisce about his days playing basketball in Angelus with Aboriginal boys from other schools. Vic was not a very good player and could only do defense. He then tells Gail that, much to his surprise, he saw one of the Aboriginal boys again a year ago; he is now a schoolteacher. Vic wanted to buy him a drink, but did not, feeling too awkward. Gail reacts strongly, not understanding Vic’s hesitation and annoyed by it. She quickly backs down, however, as Vic is clearly unwell and is suffering from neuralgia.
This final story is also the last chronologically, taking place relatively shortly after “Damaged Goods.” The difficulties in Vic and Gail's marriage that Gail discussed in that story have clearly not been resolved—in fact, they seemed to have worsened, as has Vic’s obsessive relationship to his past. Vic brings up the Aboriginal boys mentioned in “Long, Clear View”; living in a hostel, these boys were not from Angelus and were likely attending a boarding school there. These boys were also potentially part of the Stolen Generations, Aboriginal Australians who were forcibly removed from their families until the late 1960s.
Themes
Gail tells Vic that she thinks that he is living in the past and needs to confront it more directly. She asks him why he did not come with her to Angelus the year before. She directly attributes his physical state—he has had shingles twice in two months—to his unresolved trauma. Vic changes the subject, asking if Gail has started going to church again. She has, to an Anglican church, not an Evangelical one. Vic is dismissive of religion, but as their argument heats up, he begins to feel unwell. Gail starts to cry and pulls over, and Vic apologizes. Abruptly, Gail admits that she had an affair during her trip to Angelus the year before. Vic is stunned, gets out of the car, and then gets back in silently.
As Gail tells him, Vic has clearly reached the point his family and indeed he himself had feared: a physical breakdown resulting from his lack of self-care. Vic, however, is unwilling to engage with this. He is also unwilling to try to understand why Gail would turn to religion, or how she could extract something positive from an institution that he is so skeptical of. Gail’s confession then confirms the doubts she expressed about her marriage in “Damaged Goods,” which moved from speculation to action.
Themes
Vic and Gail arrive at their destination: Gail’s friends Fenn and Daisy’s farmhouse. Fenn, a large, exuberant man, is washing their children with a hose. Daisy comes to greet them, and as Vic gets out of the car he realizes intuitively that Fenn and Daisy both already know about Gail’s affair. Daisy sets out tea and biscuits, and Vic observes their home. Daisy grew up on the farm and has taken it over from her father; she and Fenn are both veterinarians. Vic wonders how they can economically sustain themselves caring for a large property like this. He thinks that Fenn, while kind and amiable, is not practically minded. Exhausted after only a few minutes, Vic excuses himself to go lie down.
Fenn and Daisy’s large, beautiful property forms a sharp contrast to the spare, often dismal spaces of Vic and Gail’s respective childhoods. This illustrates the upward mobility of their lives: they have achieved some semblance of middle-class comfort, though the trauma of their respective upbringings has come with them, too.
Themes
After Vic leaves, Fenn goes back to the children and Daisy and Gail sit and converse. Gail is seeing a female priest at the Anglican church. While she does not think she goes entirely out of guilt over her affair, she is full of deep regret. The affair was with the manager of the motel she was staying at. They discuss Vic’s need to feel that he is defending people, his childhood trauma, and his need to be “the dutiful boy” for his mother and others. Gail considers how deep she has followed Vic into his past, traveling to Angelus like she was conducting research. Gail concludes, however, that she loves Vic and will probably stay with him regardless.
Gail’s confession to Daisy reaffirms much of what has already been said about Vic and his compulsive behaviors, both for better and worse. The fundamentally self-destructive nature of that behavior has become clearer, however, after the death of Vic’s parents. All connections to his past have been severed, except for him, and now the onus is on Vic to commit to healing. Despite the difficulty of supporting someone like Vic, Gail concedes the honorable, loyal dimension of his actions, too.
Themes
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Vic lies in bed, still mulling over the financial precarity he believes must underscore Fenn and Daisy’s beautiful home. He also considers Gail’s revelation; the fact that she told her friends before him makes him feel weak and powerless. Equally fear-inducing is his physical condition. He concedes that Gail is right: he is close to collapse. He sees himself once again as a frightened boy, waiting at the window with a rifle, but now knows that going on like that is unsustainable.
Vic reflects explicitly for the first time on the events of “Long, Clear View,” a time that was evidently both deeply traumatic and formative for him, and one that he is still reckoning with. Vic is aware that he needs to change but is unsure how. As hurt as he is by Gail’s revelation, Vic also clearly understands on some level that if he wants to get better, he needs her help and cannot afford to push her away.
Themes
When Vic wakes up, the neuralgia has passed. He walks outside, reflecting on the drive. Strangely, what he is stuck on is not Gail’s confession, but his story of the Aboriginal basketball player. He is more hurt by Gail’s implying that he is racist than he is by her affair. He sees how strange this is, even finding perverse humor in it, but cannot let go of the idea; nevertheless, he knows trying to explain himself would make things worse. Lost in thought, he screams in surprise at one of Fenn and Daisy’s children, who falls and starts to cry. Vic quickly apologizes and takes her hand to find Daisy—her name is Keira. As they walk through the orchard she asks about his face, and Vic lies and says he fell off his bike.
Vic’s prickly reaction to Gail’s criticism shows how deeply intertwined his sense of justice and his sense of self-worth are. Absorbed in his thoughts, Vic is forced to snap back to reality when he encounters Keira, who personifies an archetypical child figure, suggesting the possible of renewal.
Themes
Reaching the bottom of the ridge, Vic meets Daisy and Gail. Daisy takes Keira, and Vic and Gail are left alone. Vic asks Gail if she regrets not having children, but she reminds him that she is only 34—10 years younger than him. He then tries to explain to her “about that Aboriginal bloke.” What he tells her, and neglected to say before, was that that boy he knew from school had a younger brother heavily involved in crime. Once, Vic’s father was tasked with taking him to prison, and Vic went with him, not realizing how close Bob was to his breakdown. The boy escaped, and Vic had to chase him down for his father, catching him successfully. Though he saved his father’s career, he could not face his Aboriginal friend again knowing that he was responsible for his brother’s incarceration. Gail does not know what to say, confused by Vic’s lack of a straightforward response to her confession.
While Vic’s explanation is not exactly what Gail wants to hear—that is, she is confused by the lack of reaction to her confession—his willingness to tell the whole truth, to be vulnerable, is a positive step, if one they both do not fully understand. Vic’s story also clarifies the knotted, ambiguous relationship between his sense of justice, his career, and his father’s work. While Vic does not seem to have ever truly doubted his own father’s honesty, he was confronted again and again with evidence of injustice done by the police, and not just by corrupt individuals. This is particularly evident the discriminatory treatment of Aboriginal people, especially at the time when Vic grew up.
Themes
Back at the house, Fenn has set up a skeet trap and invites Vic and Gail to shoot. Vic admits that he was a cadet and is familiar with guns but is wary of the shotgun; he tells them he has not fired a gun for 30 years, and that he “was a little creepy about it, once.” Gail is also nervous around guns, but Fenn reassures them that nothing gets hurt in skeet shooting. Fenn shoots first and misses; he is a bad shot. Daisy and Gail go inside, and they discuss Gail and Vic’s conversation. Fenn cheated on Daisy in the past, and they compare the circumstances. They stop, however, to notice Vic outside with the shotgun, hitting all his shots as Fenn cheers him on.
Vic admits for the first time that he was a cadet, a part of his memory likely very painful due to its close temporal connection with his sister’s death and its relationship to weapons and violence. At the same time, Vic believes that a gun is merely a tool, and he finds reassurance in his ability to use that tool peacefully and skillfully, without anybody getting hurt. Daisy’s story of Fenn’s cheating, while painful, offers Gail the hope that she and Vic, too, can repair their marriage.
Themes
Vic reloads the shotgun and asks Fenn if he can keep shooting; Fenn encourages him to do so. Keira watches Vic closely as he shoots. Despite his success, Vic has never fired a shotgun, only rifles. He reflects on his time as a boy and cadet, and the weapons the state trained him to use. He notes how they used to train with human-shaped targets then, in preparation for war. He thinks about how he used to wait by the window with his rifle, close to a dangerous breakdown; thankfully, Vic’s father took the rifle with him when he ran off. This is the first time Vic has held a gun since then. Vic asks Fenn to pull, but does not shoot, following the targets across the sky instead. Then he asks him to pull again, hits the targets, and smiles broadly. He keeps shooting, again and again, until he realizes it is dark out, and he feels happy.
Much like the narrator of “Immunity,” Vic here considers the way that the cadets and other institutions in the society of his youth prepared him for violence, drawing a connection between these social forces and the personal trauma he experienced. Understanding himself as a small piece of a much broader puzzle, Vic realizes how close he came to doing something he would have always regretted—and, consequently, how little control he had over what happened. In light of this, choosing not to pull the trigger is an affirmation that though he cannot control or remake the past, he does have the freedom to make his own decisions now—and the resolve to forgive and heal himself and repair his relationship with Gail.
Themes
