Breath by Tim Winton (Picador) R173
27 July 2008
It is a commonplace derived from the nineteenth-century realist novel that true
universality in fiction originates not in grandiose abstractions and portentous
generalisation, but in fidelity to a closely-observed, precisely localised reality.
In his new novel, as in his previous book, The Turning, Tim Winton confines himself to a
tiny segment of his native Australia – here the little town of Sawyer, a saw-milling
village on the south coast of Western Australia. Where he breaks new ground is in
placing surfing at the centre of his novel, and basing on that apparently limited activity an
absorbing reflection on life and death – more specifically, life as simultaneously a
defiance and a courting of death.
The narrator and main character is Bruce Pike, known as Pikelet. Now a middle-aged
paramedic, he recollects his youth in Sawyer, his friendship and rivalry with the devil-
may-care Loonie, and their relationship, as protégés and disciples, with the charismatic
Sando, a thirty-something hippy-surfer, and his embittered wife Eva, an ex-freeform skier
incapacitated by a knee injury.
Pikelet is first drawn to surfing under the spell of “How strange it was to see men doing
something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant.” But under the tutelage of Sando,
surfing becomes more than something beautiful; or rather, it becomes more beautiful the
more dangerous it is. Encouraged and goaded by Sando, the two boys take on ever more
challenging waves, driven as much by the exhilaration of danger as by the thrill of riding
the waves: “in time we surfed to fool with death – but for me there was still the outlaw
feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing on water was the best and bravest thing
a man could do.”
With Sando they form a local elite, “a secret society of three”, holding themselves aloof
from the more pedestrian “ordinary” surfers hanging around the beaches. Indeed, in
Sando’s vocabulary, ‘ordinary’ is the ultimate insult, designating the dull adherence to
safe routine that surfing, as they do it, represents a defiance of: “What we did and what
we were after, we told ourselves, was the extraordinary.”
As Sando explicates it to his two young disciples: “You’re out there, thinking: am I
gunna die? Am I fit enough enough for this? Do I know what I’m doin? Am I solid? Or
am I just … ordinary?”
The surfing sequences are terrific: never can the movements and patterns of waves, their
beauty and terror, have been described in such apparently inexhaustible detail as here.
Breath is, amongst other things, a ravishing paean to surfing.
But if the realist novel is founded on its fidelity to a literal universe, at its best it elevates
the elements of that universe onto a metaphorical level transcending its origins. If surfing
is the activity that provides the novel’s frame of reference and meaning, its related central
metaphor is, as the book’s title announces, breath.
From even before they meet Sando, Pikelet and Loonie scare onlookers by diving under
the water of the local river and clinging to the weeds for as long as their lungs can bear it:
“We scared people, pushing each other harder and further until often as not we scared
ourselves.”
In their surfing there is the same mixture of testing their own endurance and challenging
others: “More than once since then I’ve wondered whether the life-threatening high jinks
