Breath: A Novel | Tim Winton | "Could I do something gnarly, or was I just ordinary?"

Breath: A Novel | Tim Winton | Tim Winton is one of the best writers working in English

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Breath: A Novel

	Breath: A Novel Tim Winton Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

"Could I do something gnarly, or was I just ordinary?"

(4.5 stars) When a middle-aged EMT arrives at the scene of a "suicide" by a seventeen-year-old who has hanged himself, he knows instinctively that this is an accident and not an intentional suicide--he recognizes the signs. Through flashbacks, the EMT, Brucie Pike ("Pikelet") relives his own teen years and coming-of-age on the west coast of Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. A lonely boy, he finds a companion in Ivan Loon ("Loonie"), with whom he shares a love of surfing, "something beautiful... pointless and elegant." But the beauty of surfing is far less important than its excitement and increasingly dangerous thrills. "We didn't know what endorphins were, but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and how addictive it became," Pikelet declares.

Tim Winton, Australia's best known and most prolific contemporary author, takes the reader along on a series of surfing challenges--life challenges for teenage Pikelet and Loonie. They practice by holding their breaths for extraordinarily long periods of time so that they can dive deep and survive the boiling surf if they are upended, and they force themselves to go the limit on every terrifying ride. Soon the boys become disciples of middle-aged Billy Sanderson ("Sando"), a surfing guru who fears nothing and who takes them to remote and more dangerous sites. "What we did and what we were after...was the extraordinary," Pikelet declares, and the "extraordinary," he believes, can be achieved only by facing fears and daring what no one else dares.

As time passes and the boys discover women, they extend their love of thrills into the sexual arena. An older woman with whom Pikelet has a relationship introduces him to her own need for exotic thrills, and Pikelet begins finally to question the relationship between excitement, thrills, risk, and death, and what maturity really means. Does being a mature man mean giving up thrills and choosing to be "ordinary"? Is "extraordinary" a relative term bestowed on one person by other people who value the same things? And how does one really become "extraordinary"?

In spare prose which uses some of the most vivid action verbs ever, Winton tells an exciting story which makes the seductive thrills of surfing comprehensible to the non-surfer. The characters clearly reveal themselves as humans--within the surfing milieu and within their private lives. Some grow in the course of the novel, and some do not. The life lessons which Winton articulates so clearly evolve from the action of this unusual plot, and when Brucie Pike reviews his life at age fifty-two, he finally puts his life as Pikelet-the-surfer into perspective. Tim Winton's western Australian coming-of-age novel is vastly different from The Catcher in the Rye and other such novels in terms of its setting, but not so different, after all, in the boys' discoveries of what makes men humans and what makes life worth living. n Mary Whipple

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Tim Winton is one of the best writers working in English

Achingly beautiful writing, thrilling descriptions of surf, powerful narrative that captures the highs and lows of an extreme sport lifestyle, and an endlessly insightful coming of age story. I loved The Turning, and I was relieved to find that Winton's follow-up lived up to my expectations.

Catching the Big One

In a small town, a young boy finds adventure where he can. Disregarding parental distress, particularly when the lad already is disdainful of them, is part of the game. Bruce Pike lives in Sawyer, a lumber town on Western Australia's south coast. Entertainments are sparse, to say the least. The best he can do is follow his mate Ivan Loon's pace. Loonie is well named since no dare seems beyond his attempt. "Pikelet" and Loonie use the local river to find their limits - staying under water holding their breath. In relating this tale of two boys entering manhood, Winton has added yet another gem to his crown of marked successes. He copped Australia's highest literary award, the Miles Franklin, for his first novel "Cloudstreet". He deserves another for this tale of a man's boyhood reminiscences.

Holding your breath under water brings confidence and self-satisfaction, but lacks a major need in boys, the admiration of others. Loonie's his mate, but they are alone in their fulfillment. Another test beckons, one which prompts a major confrontation with Pikelet's father, who loathes the sea. There are places along the coast where the waves arrive with majestic presence, threatening to sweep all before them. Enter Sando, an experienced surfer with the calm assurance of one who can read the water. Taking Pikelet and Loonie as apprentice surfers, Sando reveals an entirely new and challenging world. Loonie, of course, is enthralled, learning quickly and responding to risk with near foolhardiness. Both endure their spills, but both want to achieve the highest success they can. Sando deftly urges them on, finally leading them to a site where the waves are big, a rock punctuates the sea, and a giant white shark is their sole observer.

Loonie's exploits bring him closer to Sando than Pikelet can come to grips with. The distance between them grows as Loonie puts himself in increased jeopardy. For all Pikelet's disdain of his parents, a smashed body delivered at their front verandah is over the top. Another challenge presents itself in the form of Sando's wife, Eva. Not a surfer, she's a devotee of snow country, staging thrilling performances as an acrobatic skier. As eager to push the envelope as her husband, Eva has been sidelined by the combination of a bad accident and incompetent surgery. Pikelet is drawn to her, even at his young age, and the relationship unfolds in a bizarre manner. Winton builds the tension of this situation with unerring skill, balancing Pikelet's relations with Eva with his admiration of Sando and his competitive role with Loonie. Winton's a masterful writer with few peers. Compressing many elements into a brief story is a masterful example of his talents. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

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Breath- " It's funny, you don't think about breathing until it's all you think about.".

This is a powerful coming of age tale set against a background of life in a small South Coast, West Australian town, surfing and a series of events that affect the rest of the young, 15 year old, Bruce Pike's life.

The novel commences with a middle aged Para Medic, Pike on the way to an emergency call, thinking of his younger colleague's disdain of him and then suddenly confronted with the apparent suicide of a teenage boy. The experienced Pike knows better and he reflects upon his own teenage years.

A paen to surfing, the story tells of the boy's love of thrill seeking, his learning to surf after seeing "grown men dancing upon the water", the relationships with family, with his young friend (Loonie)and an older role model (ex surfing champion) Sando, whose lonely wife eventually takes his interest from surfing to sex.

Pike's adulthood is not perfect but his earlier discussion with Sando, when he considered " there is nothing wrong with being ordinary" appears to be what he has achieved and is comfortable with.

You do not need to be interested in surfing to understand or enjoy this powerfull and disturbing novel. Winton's prose has the ability to bring both characters and the environment around them alive. An extraordinaly gifted writer whose stories linger in your mind long after reading is completed.

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Elemental

The West Australian coast can be raw, elemental. I was there in winter two years back, when there was a real tree-snapping gale blowing and the sea off Cape Naturaliste was a mass of churning white foam and wind-hurled spray, and an unfortunate American tourist was swept to his death from the rocks at Dunsborough.

It is this elemental world that is at the heart of Tim Winton's new novel Breath and it is about people fronting up to the elements in an attempt to free themselves from the drabness of their provincial lives.

The narrator is the nearly-50-year-old Brucie Pike. He is a paramedic and is called in one night to deal with an adolescent suicide, which he recognises is not a suicide at all, but a case of masturbatory auto-asphyxiation gone wrong. For reasons which emerge later on in the novel, this sad event spurs Pike into a recollection of his teen years, those years of coming of age when life is lived at its most intense, most meaningful but, in many ways, most ignorant and most painful.

And Breath is nothing if not intense. Pike's adolescent relationship with his fearless mate, Loonie, and their interaction with the non-conformist married couple Sando and Eva are at the heart of the 200-page story. These people push themselves to the edge, embracing fear, paradoxically, to overcome their fear, and in doing so, experiencing momentary transcendence - the adrenalin rush, the feeling of being purely alive. The boys, under Sando's tutelage, surf the most menacing waves they can find; Eva's rush comes from - or came from - extreme freestyle skiing.

And yet this elemental intensity - almost faultlessy depicted by Winton - is tempered, through Pike's eyes, by a profounder sense of reality. Loonie may be fearless - but he is emotionally blind; he could not be the narrator of the story. Sando is not as free-spirited as he first appears. Eva, after a bad skiing accident, is semi-crippled and embittered, existing out there on the edge, perversely so, as events in the novel later reveal.

So the surf may be pure white, but the undercurrents are dark and deep. Only Pike, in spite of everything, is a survivor - because he has one foot on the land, one foot in the water. It is only he, in a pivotal episode in the novel, who sees the futility of trying to surf the Nautilus - the extremest of extreme breakers - because it is not a real surfer's wave; it doesn't allow for the "pointless beauty" of riding the long waves in - the recognition of which suggests a kind of hard-won, precariously balanced maturity that none of the other protagonists, in this beautiful and richly-observed novel, manage to achieve.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4

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