Addiction looms large in The Turning, as characters struggle with it themselves or struggle to support their family, friends, and partners through it. The reasons characters develop addictions are varied, though often stemming from personal trauma. Through the book’s portraits of addiction and its effects, Winton argues that addiction is always complex, and it requires patience, understanding, and support to be overcome. All the same, not everyone is able to provide that support, for a myriad of reasons, and in some communities, circumstances enable and abet the development of addictions, making support harder to come by. Many of the towns in which The Turning is set are declining, as the maritime industries they depend on close, beginning a chain reaction of economic devastation. In this environment, without future prospects, people lose themselves in substance use, like Eric Larwood and Max, both of whom are addicted to alcohol, a legal substance. The proliferation of illegal—and more powerful—drugs, such as heroin, is an escalation of this same process, rather than a different situation entirely. The societal backdrop that encourages drug dependency is not limited to users; Boner McPharlin, for example, only becomes involved in Angelus’s budding heroin trade after losing his job at the meatworks—unjustly, as he tells it. While there are characters with less direct sources for their addiction, like Fay Keenan, who grew up in a loving home and did not start to use heroin until later in life, Winton shows that there is always a root cause—a perceived inner lack—which must be taken seriously by others, not dismissed. Thus, he suggests that addiction should not be seen primarily as a moral failure, but as a response to circumstances—self-destructive to be sure, but understandable—and that, as such, it can only be addressed with acceptance and love.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Addiction Quotes in The Turning
I felt strangely short of breath and when I followed him indoors. I was unprepared for how strongly the shack smelled of him. It was not an unpleasant odour, that mix of shaving soap, leathery skin and sweat, but the sudden familiarity of it overwhelmed me. It was the scent of a lost time, how my father smelled before the funk of antacids and the peppermints that never quite hid the stink of booze. I nearly fell into the wooden chair he pulled out for me. While he stoked up the old Metters stove and set the blackened kettle on it I tried to compose myself.
Once upon a time it had been true. Honest Bob. He was straight as a die and what you saw was what you got. I believed in him. He was Godlike. His fall from grace was so slow as to be imperceptible, a long puzzling decline. Even during that time he was never rough or deliberately unkind. If he had been it would have been easier to shut off from him. He just disappeared by degrees before our eyes, subsiding into a secret disillusionment I never understood, hiding the drink from my mother who, when she discovered it, hid it from me in turn for fear I would lose respect for him. She turned herself inside out to protect him and then me. And at such cost. All for nothing. He ran away. Left us. I grew up in a hurry.
Drugs, I spose. Never really understood it. Just that he’d fallen foul of em. And any question, any witness account died on the vine, didn’t matter who it came to. Felt like, whatever was going on I was the only bloke not in on it. And the city blokes were in on it; it was bigger than that little town, that’s for sure. So who do you talk to? Even if you’ve got the balls, who can you trust? It ate me alive. Ulcers, everything. I should have quit but I didn’t even have the courage to do that. Would have saved us all a lot of pain. But it’s all I ever wanted to do, you see, be a cop. And I hung on till there was nothing left of me, nothing left of any of us. Cowardice, it’s a way of life. It’s not natural, you learn it.
No, he decided. He’d say nothing. It was what he was best at now. When you’ve lost your pride there’s nothing left to say.
He lay there to wait it out. At the first break in the fog he’d take the camera up the rock and set the flash off at regular intervals. Eventually he’d guide the vollies up to where he was. It’d come out alright. They wouldn’t freeze to death. The girl, Marie, would forget her blubbering fear because she’d get her rescue piece on the front page. She’d have her victim, her ordeal, her stoic hero. It’d be a great story, a triumph, and none of it would be true.
