The family here is crucial, blessed, a safe island. Ort’s parents, who are radiant to him, the source of all love and wisdom, his moral ground, are refugees from confused hippy days, as pagan as the next person but somehow calmer and more loving than most. They fled the city long ago, and scrape a living in the forest country, far enough out of the city not to have to deal with it: but its outer suburbs creep closer each year, and after this summer Ort will have to follow his teenage sister Tegwyn down to the high school where he knows he’ll have his unfashionable head shoved down the dunny. So for Ort, it’s the summer that divides boyhood from youth. He loves his family, even his senile, bedridden Grammar and the furious Tegwyn, with a watchful love that makes him peep at them, as they sleep or wash or make love, through cracks in the wall. He’s not a perv. He’s just keeping watch over his world.

We are warned on page one, and by page five Ort’s happy, grubby life has fallen apart. He’s standing on the road in the dark looking into his father’s smashed-up ute. ‘The seats are all back and forward and up and over everywhere. Everything inside is sticky. It’s blood – I’m not stupid.’

When they bring his father home he’s a vegetable, blank-eyed, that has to be dragged to the bath and fed with a spoon like a baby.

Tegwyn, in full adolescent revolt, is of no use. Grammar is already the family burden, though cheerfully borne, no doubt because she was once the kind of pianist who, when a man at a dance had a go at her, ‘knocked his teeth out with one hand and kept playing the bass part of On Moonlight Bay with the other’. It’s up to Ort and his mother to carry the load. And they lug it on their own, until a stranger turns up at their door and offers his services. Desperate, they accept. Henry Warburton is a full-blown southern-style weirdo – educated, but God- and devil-tormented, half epileptic, driven by an inarticulate need to purge himself of a lurid past. Each day he bathes the father, and through the crack in the wall, Ort, confused and fascinated, listens to his monologues.

Warburton teaches them the rudiments of the faith and they practise it blindly, against Tegwyn’s barrage of contemptuous abuse. In an old Holden got by foul means, Warburton takes them to the sea. Ort’s first encounter with the ocean is one of the book’s high points: he is awe-struck, dumped, stripped, cleansed. But in Ort’s, and Winton’s, world, life without the father has no meaning: it is only brute survival. Ort and his mother approach the orthodox church and are sent empty away. In the end, when Tegwyn and Warburton run away together and Grammar dies and everything has gone thick and sluggish with despair, all that’s left is direct contact with the cloud – and down it comes, in a final scene that I can’t read without bawling.

Winton has kept quiet about his Christianity until now, except in the short story collection Scission where glimpses of it flashed unnamed. But in That Eye The Sky he comes right out with it. This novel will kick up a fuss. There is nothing like it in what I have read of Australian writing. Winton did his apprenticeship and quietly made his reputation before he ran his colours up the mast. Now the question is, who will salute?