To read Tim Winton's new novel Eyrie is to be reminded of the author's sublime ability with language and insight into human hearts. It also reminded me that Winton is a storyteller who does not tie things up neatly but requires your engagement to distil the story.

Tom Keely is living in a high-rise apartment block in Fremantle, The Mirador, and when we first meet him he is surfacing from a monstrous hangover. Tom has lost his job and his marriage is over. Western Australia has embraced the resource boom with "pentecostal ecstasy". Tom has become a "procedural obstacle". Somewhere along the line he has been sacked.

Coming out of the lift one day, Tom encounters Gemma. Years before, Tom's father Nev, an evangelising Christian, had repeatedly faced down Gemma's drunken father. Gemma and her sister were taken into the Keely household. Now the adult Gemma's daughter in is gaol and she is looking after her grandson Kai.  Tom is reluctantly drawn into Gemma's orbit and becomes embroiled in her family and financial problems.

Winton takes us into Tom's head. It can be a bleak place - full of contempt for the prosperous and beautiful coffee-sippers and stroller pushers of Fremantle, and plagued by gaps in recollection that confound him and his family. Winton is a master at depicting the sensations of nausea, pain and collapse. The portrayal of Fremantle's varied population, the gentrifiers, the backpackers, the buskers, the drunks and the drug addicts is potent. Tom's brief career as dishwasher at Bub's cafe is conjured with a torrent of fat-smeared plates, towers of clattering cooking pans, thumping music, the venomous cook and tins filled with cigarette butts outside the back door - you get the picture, you can feel it on your skin, throbbing in your head and clogging your nostrils.

Tom's  path back to participation in an emotional world, is connected with his developing relationship with Kai. Tom fans Kai's nascent interest in birds, taking him on a excursion in his tinny, to see an osprey in its eyrie. He becomes a scrabble partner, an escort and he organises refuge for Gemma and Kai when the standover men begin to call.  Within the limits of his scrambled mental condition, around Kai, Tom can be a righteous protector, like his father. He aspires to defend the boy as he defended the environment. Kai presents him with an opportunity to be caring and selfless.

The ending of this story has already been controversial among early readers. It is Winton at his most challenging. For me reading Tim Winton's Eyrie has amply rewarded the long wait for a new novel.