Breath - Tim Winton (Penguin 2008) - A Review
- thedolphin
- May 17, 2016
- 3 min read
thedolphin is the resident staff writer on all matters of an intellectual nature at thewhale surf blog. thedolphin is an advanced creature with a massive brain.......
Breath – Tim Winton (Penguin 2008)
I should start by declaring I know nothing about surfing. But I do know about breathing and I reckon I know more about it now that Bruce Pike’s had his say. Breathing in all its forms – from snoring to auto-asphyxiation – is so central to this novel it’s almost a character. But for Pike (the narrator), this essential-to-life act is also a stifling one: ‘an endless capitulation to biological routine’. And so he resists it, in increasingly dangerous ways, until – well, you’ll see.
thewhale recommended Breath to me as a ‘coming of age surfing’ novel – a bit of a worry to a middle-aged non-surfer. But because the story consists of the adult Pike looking back half-comprehendingly on the risks and vicissitudes of his youth, it worked fine for me. In fact, I think it’s a very good novel.
Four protagonists – a young couple and two teenage boys – are thrown together and then driven apart by the ocean. Some are hiding, some are seeking; all are damaged or vulnerable. There is loyalty and betrayal, family and friendship, and, above (sometimes below) all, there are waves. The novel’s framing device – Pike as an adult paramedic arriving at a scene of domestic disaster – contains all the clues in its opening section. Thereafter we follow his young ‘Pikelet’ self’s trajectory through a surf-obsessed adolescence poisoned by other people’s problems, into a complicated adulthood.
Growing up in ‘60s/‘70s small-town Australia, Pikelet and his hell-raising, tearaway mate, Loonie, discover the thrill of staying underwater until the light splinters, the feeling goes, the lungs start to collapse inwards. They begin in a local river, holding submerged roots to stay under and scare those on the bank, but they end up scaring themselves. Then they discover ‘something completely pointless and beautiful’: surfing. And before they’ve even stepped on a board, they’ve started to fall under the spell of a stranger with a ‘princely manner’ on the waves. This ‘delicious enigma’, Sando, deepens their urge to feel alive and resist being ordinary, and strives to reveal to them, via increasingly extreme wave-riding, that ‘eventually there’s just you and it.’
If this sounds like bonged-out surfer speak, that’s not how the book comes across, because the grown-up Pike is constantly sifting memories for clues with which to make sense of his adulthood. And there’s the fourth character, Eva – apparently at arm’s length from the surfing triumvirate – whose influence on Pikelet slowly increases, with unexpected consequences.
Winton’s descriptive writing is powerful: semirural Australia is concisely but vividly drawn with its pollen-dusted acacias, abrasive and suspicious locals, and stony bitumen spitting from the child narrator’s bike tyres. There’s even a shark called Barney. But the best descriptions are of waves and breaths, and it’s Winton’s ability to hold a line between these antitheses of air and water that makes this novel stand out. In fact, a couple of passages describing running out of air actually had me gasping. Caught in a hold down, lungs empty and without hope of refilling, the narrator brought the instinctive, essential act of breathing to the surface of my own consciousness; and, as a means of getting the reader to sense Pike’s lifelong ‘quest to feel’, that’s very effective.

An interview with Tim Winton about the book.
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