So it is an appropriate first word, not merely a quirk, because Eyrie is a narrative very much of our time and place. Its protagonist, Tom Keely, is forty-seven years old, well beyond Generation ‘This’ or ‘That’, but he is thoroughly familiar with software and hardware and text talk, and has been integrally and intricately a part of that world and its electronic penumbra.

‘Has been’ is accurate, though, because Keely has dropped out. Like George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London, Keely has a bolt-hole – his mother Doris’s house in a more salubrious part of the city – but also like Orwell, though for different reasons, he espouses his descent into the subworld. ‘Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty,’ observes Henry Miller in Tropic of Capricorn, and everything would indeed have followed with dead certainty for Keely had it not been for his chance meeting with Gemma, a childhood friend. They both live in the ragtag Mirador, a ‘classic shitbox’, where the lobby ‘stank of laundry soap, fresh paint and mopped floors’, reminiscent of Winston Smith’s Victory Mansions, with its ‘hallway [smelling] of boiled cabbage and old rag mats’. On the tenth floor, with ‘an unparalleled prospect of the great Indian Ocean’, Keely has his ‘seedy little eyrie’.

How and why Keely gave up the ghost is revealed in fragments as the story unfolds: suffice to say that he has obviously been a significant figure in the environmental movement and seems to have been brought down by the intensity and straightforwardness of his own commitment. Abused and defamed, he is defeated and in retreat. He has given up ‘… trying to hold to the long view, the greater hopes he’d begun with. Like appealing to people’s higher nature. And getting Nature itself a fair hearing. Which was, of course, in [Western Australia], at such a moment in history, like catching farts in a butterfly net.’ That historic ‘moment’ is frenetic: ‘… fresh permission to drill, strip, fill or blast … Oil, gas, iron, gold, lead, bauxite and nickel – it was the boom of all booms and in a decade it had taken hostage every institution from government to education.’

‘... Eyrie is a narrative very much of our time and place.’

This is Tom Keely as we meet him damply emerging from the ‘mouldy shower recess’ – no stately plump Buck Mulligan this, but a teetering, horribly hung-over wreck with a ‘battlefield’ face, and a ‘wild man beard’, above which the skin was ‘… all gullies and flaky shale. Badlands.’ Wrapped in his mildewy towel, he looks through the glary floor-to-ceiling window to distant Perth – ‘… philistine giant eager to pass off its good fortune as virtue, quick to explain its shortcomings as east-coast conspiracies, always at the point of seceding … Leviathan with an irritable bowel.’ And ten storeys below him, ‘Good old Freo … the addled wharfside slapper … low rise but high rent, defiant and deluded in equal measure.’

Keely’s eyrie – apart from the view – is depressing enough, but it protects him from the world he has left behind and from which he shields himself by never listening to the radio, not answering calls, and having liberal recourse to alcohol, sleeping pills, and other assorted medications. Serendipity beats him though. His meeting with Gemma, who lives a few doors along the corridor, enmeshes Keely, despite his reluctance, in her increasingly complex and ultimately dangerous affairs. This involvement marks the start of his relationship with her grandson, Kai.

In Winton’s oeuvre, Kai has a forebear in Ort, the young central character of That Eye, the Sky (1986). Ort is older and more mature, but both boys share an uncanny aura, a sense they give to attentive adults that there is something strange, though incipiently illuminating, profound, about them. Ort comes to the conclusion that the mysteries that surround him – the blows of fate, distress, grievous loss among others – can only be understood through the kind of visionary act that lays open the secrets of the sky and stars.

Kai is not yet capable of this kind of thinking, but he expresses his intensities and fears through his disturbing sketches and his penchant for gnomic statements, which seem quite at odds with his emotional and physical age. For Keely, the effect of Kai’s strangeness, his rigidly disciplined facial expressions – ‘almost affectless’ as Keely styles it – is exacerbated by dreams in which he sees Kai backlit at his balcony window or dangerously poised at the balcony rail above the void. Keely is horrified when he discovers the boy is having dreams about falling.

Kai is obsessive, scrupulously arranging food on his plate, carefully aligning the Scrabble tiles on the board, insisting on silence during the game, losing interest when the contest degenerates into a succession of inconclusive tinkerings. Keely cannot fathom the boy’s ‘fugues’, the times when ‘he was impassive, unreachable’, when ‘he could blink you away, delete you from his presence’. Yet somehow closeness to Kai makes him feel ‘that his life was different, that it had finally tilted towards something coherent’.

Keely, Gemma, and Kai, with Doris desperately rational in support, play out their drama in relentlessly sleazy, grotesque locations. The ‘great ocean’ and a whiff of distant countryside are fleeting mitigations of a pervasive urban sordidness. There is rarely any relief. A drive to Bandyup involves traversing ‘the drab entirety of Perth – every … car yard and junk food franchise on the ravaged plain’ – in order to arrive in ‘the outlands where droughted horse paddocks gave way to housing estates of heartbreaking ugliness’.

‘Winton has been increasingly moved ... to notice just how thin the cries of Nature have become amidst the clank and whine of the boom.’

If this seems unlike Winton, one needs only to refer to Dirt Music (2007), in which the coastal town of White Point, beginning as ‘a bunch of tin sheds … wedged between the sea and the majestic white sandhills of the interior’, has burgeoned in the boom, so that ‘nowadays rich fishermen built pink brick villas and concrete slab bunkers that made their fathers’ hovels look pretty’.

Always concerned to give ‘Nature itself a fair hearing’, Winton has been increasingly moved – in his fiction but also, as it happens, in his personal life – to notice just how thin the cries of Nature have become amidst the clank and whine of the boom. In Dirt Music, Nature’s hearing came in the form of moments like this: ‘Beneath the surface the water is transfixed by bars of sunlight which ripple and twist in the misty aqua blur below ... Now and then a startled garfish snoots away. Jellyfish float amidst the clouds reflected on the water. They are cumulous, their tentacles like strings of rain.’

The description of the jellyfish merging with and emerging from the raining clouds, which they both mirror and embody, is so good you could weep.

No such moments occur in Eyrie, which seems to me to be a kind of apotheosis of a growing outrage and its attendant helplessness. A narrative style which is at times a version of stream of consciousness allows Winton’s own views to suffuse his character’s without being obtrusive – although Keely’s spiritual flaccidity may sometimes seem at odds with the scorched-earth energy of some of the observations. His well-intentioned strategies to help Gemma against Kai’s murderous father are amateurish and are clearly doomed to fail. They must fail from a fictional point of view, too, because a neat concluding coup would have strained credulity.Gemma’s problems, the conditions that brought Keely down and have arguably unhinged him, and the momentum of the mining boom that depersonalises, dwarfs, and marginalises them are all for the time being beyond resolution. A freeze-frame is the only credible closing option.

There are small residual puzzles. The strange, irremovable damp stain in Keely’s flat, which seemed portentous, drops out of narrative sight. How he came by his ‘shiner’ remains mysterious, as does Kai, so heart-wrenchingly vulnerable and disturbed.

So Eyrie has some loose ends, which may be the result of Winton’s pressing need to get these things said – plot may have partially succumbed to narrative urgency – but this is a gripping, accomplished novel in which a very fine writer balances the imaginative freedoms of story with a scarifying assessment of the way we live now.