: Breath, Tim Winton, Picador Rs 400
A novel surfing on beautiful sentences
When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it,” wrote Herman Melville. Tim Winton’s Breath is a story of striving, of trying to surpass the ordinary by asserting mastery over the waves. Bruce Pike, an aging paramedic, casts back to his 12-year-old self, stifled and restless among millers and loggers and farmers in a tiny western Australian town called Sawyer. Pikelet is somewhat different from his folks — he struggles against ordinariness. With his best friend Loonie, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, he ventures past his parents’ bounds and rides out to the coast to watch the surfers, struck by “how strange it is to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared”.
The two boys are soon addicted to the thrill of riding the waves, but the bravado soon shifts to something more serious after they encounter Sando, a hippified surfer with a secret history and a sullen wife called Eva. Sando gets them hooked to the devil in the deep blue sea, as they seek heightened dangers, more treacherous waters. “Loonie and I strove to outdo each other, to take off as late as possible, to drop in with the studied nonchalance we copied from Sando, and then steer up into the shimmering cave each wave made of itself. Inside those waves our voices bounced back at us, deeper and larger for all the noise, like the voices of men. We felt stronger, older. We came howling from the gullet of wave upon wave and stopped believing in the shark altogether.”
Breath is also a meditation on the loose companionship and competition that course through male friendships. Loonie is a wonderful character, with his split-lip grin, daring Pikelet, badgering “till the point you challenged him to do something you had no interest in him doing”. Compared with Loonie’s endless and “aimless reservoir of physical bravery” that somehow constricts his subtler feelings, Pikelet is held back not only by his fear, but also his thoughtfulness, his incapacity to entirely thrill to the triumph of surviving incredibly dangerous situations. In contrast, after Loonie hurls himself into harm’s way and emerges, battered, on the other side, he looks at the “weird dilating eye of the wave” and gives it the...
