The Boy Behind the Curtain: Havoc: A Life in Accidents Summary & Analysis

At nine years old, Winton sits in the passenger seat as his father drives them home from the beach. They’ve been fishing, but it was Winton’s desire to spend time with his father, not the fishing, that attracted Winton to the outing. Out of nowhere, a motorbike zooms past the car and overtakes them, speeding up the road into the distance. But then the motorbike’s taillight disappears suddenly. Winton’s father stops the car and tells Winton to stay where he is.

Winton leans forward to see his father kneeling beside a motionless body before dragging the motorbike off the road. He returns to the car and drives to find a phone and call an ambulance, and then he drives back to the injured rider. His calmness disturbs Tim, for whom the scene is immensely stressful. The rider is convulsing on the ground. Tim’s father tells Winton to continuously pump the brake pedal so that the ambulance can see their lights from afar—a task that might’ve only served to keep Winton occupied. The rider’s face looks like a raw piece of meat.

The rider tries to get up and begins to scream, and as the ambulance approaches, he yells and struggles more violently, saying that he needs to go. Tim’s father holds the rider down. When the ambulance arrives, the chaos deepens, and the rider’s father appears, first weeping at the sight of his son and then attempting to throttle him and to fight the paramedics and Tim’s father. Winton is shocked at the sight of the man attempting violence on his own son, and he panics at the sight of his dad being threatened.

The police arrive, and Winton and his father head home. His father downplays the incident to his mother, but Winton feels rattled and out of control. Later, as an adult, when he attempts to make sense of his fear, he realizes that it echoed the fear of almost losing his father a few years before that incident. At the time of the motorbike crash, he’d gotten used to his dad’s scars and the scent of his anti-inflammatory ointment, but the sight of his father in danger brought up the anxieties he felt when his father had first been badly injured. Looking back, he sees his life as a “topography of accidents.”

Winton grew up as a child of a police officer who worked in the Accidents Branch dealing with traffic collisions and sometimes attending fatal incidents. As a child, he learns to tread carefully around his father, vicariously bearing the emotional burden of witnessing fatal crashes and the exhaustion of dealing with human mistakes. The fear he sees on his mother’s face helps him understand the dangers of his father’s job. When Winton is five, that fear surfaces when a driver runs a stop sign and hits his father, who was on his motor bike.

Tim’s father is catastrophically injured in the crash; when the paramedics find him, he’s close to death. His chances of survival and recovery are slim. His state is so dire that two of his colleagues resign after visiting him. Winton is the oldest child and the only one who truly registers what’s going on as his mother struggles to keep the family afloat. When his father returns home, completely disabled, he’s enraged that a stranger has ruined his family’s once-stable life.

Winton habitually seeks out his father’s helmet—the one he was wearing during the accident. The inside of the helmet smells like the father he remembers, while the outside reminds him of the near-death experience. The helmet is all that stood between his father and death.

Tim’s father’s accident and long recovery force Winton to grow up quickly and become useful in the household. He must take on the role of the strong eldest sibling and help his mother with things he doesn’t understand. The house feels dim and stagnant, transformed from what it used to be. They welcome visits from family and friends, but one visitor is a complete stranger who offers to bathe his father.

Winton finds it extremely strange that a strange man is undressing, carrying, and bathing his father, and the idea of a stranger washing his father as though his father were an infant appalls him. But Winton learns that, while strangers can ruin your life (like the one who hurt his father), they can also show great kindness. One day, the stranger brings olive oil with him and anoints Tim’s father’s feet as in the Christian tradition. After his father’s recovery, Tim’s parents become lifelong Christians.

Tim’s parents’ newfound faith and hope rejuvenates Tim. Looking back, he realizes that the stranger’s actions were a miracle of decency and grace in a world that Winton learned could be horrific and vile.

After Tim’s father recovers, he returns to work; he initially works the Accident Desk and then draws up schematics of accidents for the courts to refer to. He has no memory of his own accident, but reflecting as an adult, Winton knows that it must’ve been hard for his father to return to the kind of work he’d once been implicated in. His dad eventually gets back on motorbikes and sometimes drops Winton off at school; Winton pretends to enjoy this, though he’s terrified.

Winton realizes as an adult that the motorbike accident he witnessed with his father bothered him so strongly because it felt like an echo of the time his life unraveled as a child. Many years later, he wrote a story about a similar incident, but this time the boy pressing the brake pedal leaps out to defend his father. He knows, looking back, that his father’s near-death experience unsettled him permanently and would keep resurfacing in echoing events throughout his life.

Eight years after witnessing that motorcycle accident, Winton finds himself in a car crash, the only passenger in a car that plows through the perimeter wall of a girls’ school. The driver escapes unhurt, but paramedics cut Winton of his seatbelt and take him to hospital in an ambulance. After leaving the hospital, Winton feels extremely weak and rattled and tries to work out whether he’s feeling grief or shock. He hasn’t lost anyone, but he feels enfeebled and stuck. 

The accident and ensuing recovery focus Tim’s mind. He’s been drifting along at university, but after returning to work, he writes three books before graduating. He realizes that the life he imagined—supplementing his writing with manual labor—is no longer viable now that his back has been injured. He must support himself with writing alone, which, looking back, he realizes fueled him to follow his childhood dream of being a writer.

As a teenager, Winton toys with near-death experiences. He crawls into tight underwater crevices with only a snorkel and challenges himself to find his way out before he runs out of air. Though he puts himself in situations of severe danger, he feels completely alive when he manages to escape unscathed.

Looking back, Winton reflects on the fact that those and other moments of danger were times in which he knew himself the best. He suggests there’s an innate sense people use to feel danger approaching and to accept the inevitable process of surviving it. He describes finding a crashed car with a mother and child, helping the child to stay calm by enlisting her to press the brake pedal as his father once told him to. In this incident, Winton himself is the one helping with the injured driver until the ambulance arrives. He becomes robotic on the outside and hysterical on the inside, and he wonders whether this is his truest state.

As an adult, Winton no longer goes looking for trouble, though trouble seems to have followed him through his life. He considers the idea of surprise and danger in the surrounding world. Though people go out of their way to find thrills, even inflicting pain on themselves or others to interrupt their own boredom, they expect and rely upon predictability. Winton notes that a magazine rejected one of his stories because it described a shark attack that “came out of nowhere.” Even though his friends claim to enjoy surprises, he knows that real, unexpected danger is something that will always disrupt a seemingly safe life. And yet he knows that his life as a writer, like his father’s as a police officer, relies on danger and chaos—it’s accidents that fuel stories, just as they shape each person’s identity.