That Eye, the Sky<i> by Tim Winton (Atheneum: $13.95, 160 pp.) </i>

“That Eye, the Sky” is Tim Winton’s third novel. His first, “An Open Swimmer” (1982) shared Australia’s Vogel Award. In 1984 his second novel, “Shallows,” set in the whaling community in the southwest of Western Australia, won Australia’s Miles Franklin Award. In both books the landscape is coastal. Water imagery and the excitement of places where land and sea meet are used poetically in his portrayal of human relationships.

In this new novel Winton has created the narrator Morton Flack, “ ‘Ort’ ” for short.”

“It only takes one thing to make you unhappy,” Ort, on the threshold of high school, realizes when his father, Sam, is paralyzed after a car accident.

The Flacks, leftover hippies from the ‘60s, live in a weatherboard house in the scrub bordering the Jarrah forest. Opposite, adding to the sense of isolation, is a rundown roadhouse and gas station. The silence of the forest--”The forest moves quiet tonight. Jarrahs move a long way up and out of sight”--and the overwhelming presence of the West Australian sky--”At night the sky blinks at us, always looking down”--complete the loneliness.

Through the cracks and knotholes in the weatherboards Ort is able to observe and overhear. In the house are his father, who used to dropkick the rooster to show who was boss; his mother, Alice, and his flouncing, big-breasted, sometimes bitter--”In two years there’ll be no jobs”--older sister, Tegwyn, and his grandmother, “Grammar.” Grammar used to play the piano and was known to have continued playing with one hand while striking out to stop a fight with the other. Now, with that uncanny good sense that often accompanies senility, she enjoys holding a big red apple because she can see it, and she sits with her feet up on the windowsill on hot nights to let the breeze up her nightie. Every mealtime she has to be spoon fed.

In spite of his keyhole learning, Ort keeps his innocence and uses it to see reason in human behavior. His keyhole observations are not an end in themselves. It is through the cracks that he hears the life story of Henry Warburton, an itinerant, born-again evangelist who turns up at the Flack homestead and immediately makes himself indispensable. He gives Ort’s father baths. He digs the garden, plays cricket and is company, of a sort, for Alice and Tegwyn. Warburton’s life has crumbled in the usual present-day tragedies, his family killed in an accident, his teaching work ended and his own father turning him away. It is the keyhole that reveals which of the two women allows Warburton half a bed.

Tegwyn, 16 and rebellious, resembles her mother at that age. She is very much alive; her few appearances in the novel contrast with Warburton, whose stilted language intrudes.

Winton has just placed the evening sky through Ort: “. . . the sky goes way back tonight; it’s like looking into water, and you wonder why you can’t see your reflection . . . .” And then Warburton speaks: “It’s time I stated my purpose. I haven’t meant to be deceitful; God has sent me here . . . .” His words are never paraphrased by Ort, never told in Ort’s inimitable way. Warburton apart, all Winton’s dialogues are successfully convincing.

The great strength of the novel is in the way the grotesque contrasts and parallels in human life are spread out, examined and accepted. Particularly the parallels. Alice explains to Ort that his father is not dead, he simply is “not awake.” He now resembles Ort when he had meningitis as a small boy.

“You were a baby all over again. You were born all over again . . . . Three years old--in nappies.”

Does tragedy bring rebirth? Perhaps it can. Winton has skillfully combined love and devotion with harsh realities. When Sam leaves for town: “ ‘Wave him off, Ort,’ Mum says to me. She always reckons you should show people you love them when they go away because you might never see them again. . . .”