Book review of Breath by Tim Winton

A Book Review:

Breath (by Tim Winton, published by Picador)

by Sam Bleakley

There is little in the way of relaxation in this taut novella. It is like a stretched rubber band about to snap. In fact, like gasping for breath. In comparison with the natural elements, the characters are small, barely sketched. The land, sky and sea have personality, take big gulps, and release their tensions suddenly: ‘The sea was dark now and the sky even blacker. Vapour hung in shrouds above the cliffs. Quite suddenly and with great force it began to rain.’

Two boys, Pikelet and Loonie, grow up in a backwater in western Australia, and are bonded by a love of swimming. Loonie pushes Pikelet to test who can hold their breath longest under water, but there is already something sinister in Loonie’s interest in pushing the limits, so that when they start surfing a few years later, Loonie becomes the ‘hellman’ where Pikelet is cautious and feels the fear. An older guru figure and ‘limits’ surfer, Billy Sanderson (Sando) enters the boys’ lives, driving a wedge between them that will eventually destroy their friendship and lead Loonie into self-destruction. Sando has a neurotic wife, Eva, who was once ‘at the radical margin of her own sport’, a top freestyle skier, but is now retired with a mangled knee and an addiction to painkillers. ‘Her tongue often tasted of…the brassiness of painkillers’ recalls the adult Pikelet. Seduced by 25-year-old Eva while Sando and Loonie are on a surf trip to Indonesia, an emotionally naive 15-year-old Pikelet becomes an unwilling accomplice in her perverse erotic games of auto-asphyxiation (games that make her ‘come like a freight train’). Pikelet is soon out of his depth.

‘Depth’ would be an alternative title for Winton’s bestseller. There is always something rumbling from below. While the boy is a reluctant accomplice to Eva’s strange pleasures, ‘There were whale songs on the stereo.’ A resident great white shark occasionally appears from the deep at a big wave spot that Sando introduces to the boys. The paradoxical mix of fear and pleasure in big wave surfing resonates with the uncertain depths of relationship. A point comes where you can no longer hang around at the edge of the boil - you either take off to gamble with the extraordinary, or you paddle in, choosing the safety of the ordinary. Paradoxically, riding a big reef break is ‘like a moth riding light’, where the weight, the gravity, the initiation, is in the depths, in the hold-down: ‘Things went narrow…the white world was trying to kill me…when the sea let go…it seemed my throat was jammed shut.’ In relationship too Pikelet inhabits the core darkness of ‘the white world’: ‘It was as if some mighty turbulence had hold of me’.

In Winton’s account, big wave surfing perversely becomes a compensation for things missing in life, not an enrichment of that life. As Winton says in an interview, ‘I guess surfing and the sea got me through the grimmer parts of adolescence’ and ‘I think surfing has, at times, saved me from doing self-destructive things.’ From this more negative viewpoint, the passion of surfing is inherently destructive rather than creative. It is in the paradoxically erotic turbulence of the wipeout, in the danger of the hold-down, in the near-asphyxiation, that surfing generates its charge, and not in what Winton calls the ‘dance’ of surfing, the ‘doing something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant.’

At times Winton’s surfing descriptions are masterful and brilliant. ‘…He’d stand at the very tip of the board with his spine arched and his head thrown back as if he’d just finished singing an anthem that nobody else could hear,’ is a superb account of Sando’s soul arch nose ride. But Breath brings out both bright and dark aesthetics of surfing, based on narcissistic pleasure, echoing erotic auto-asphyxiation. This may be true for the few, but for the majority, surfing is cultural and communal and pleasure does not come from deliberate restriction. People make their living from making and selling surfboards, from competing at the highest level, and from the associated industries of fashion, travel, and journalism. Maybe Winton is confronting the age-old question - which is better, surfing or sex? If Big Wednesday is about 'surfing and relationships', Breath is about 'surfing and sex'. Written into a film script, Breath could make a cracking movie, because, as we all know, sex sells.

Sando has some sexy surfboards. ‘They were Brewers, huge beautiful things.’ But for all his rejection of his previous incarnation as a high-profile surfer appearing in the glossy magazines, Sando’s lifestyle is just another fashion statement: the long hair, the earrings, the ‘yoga routine’, and Carlos Castaneda on his bookshelf. In sum, he embraces the fashion of the day - attitude and rebellion as retreat to country hippie soul. But the commercialism is evident. He cares enough about the surfboards he rides to have the best Brewers - three, yellow big wave boards: He invents surf tourism with forays into Indonesia. Winton, like many writers on surfing before him, has attempted to abstract the aesthetic and feeling of surfing from its evident material and cultural dimensions. This is a mistake. Surfing has always been a marriage between form and function. The combined craft of the shaper and glasser precedes the expert rider who turns craft into art. Also, the feeling of ‘going surfing’ is not just derived from the sensation of plummeting down a wave face, but is already prepared for us culturally by a surf industry, including, most importantly, the surf movie, whose job is to ‘stoke’, or get a mindset going that prepares us for surfing. Oddly, having experienced the aesthetic of the extraordinary, Pikelet at age 50 seems de-sensitised to the possibilities of the surfboard, now riding ‘an old ten-footer, a real clunker from the sixties.’

From Winton’s own accounts in interviews, he is a soul surfer for whom nothing is better than ‘surfing with a couple of whales spouting and tail-slapping just behind the break.’ He is pretty caustic about what comes out of the surfing media, particularly the quality of writing, which he says is ‘deadly embarrassing’. In Breath, Pikelet, at 50 goes surfing and is ‘free’, he doesn’t ‘require management’ – surfing is beyond the commercial. But this is naïve. Surfers bring culture with them in the boards they ride, and the way they ride them. Winton is ‘managed’ - by the ‘soul surfer’ mentality, familiar to those who have engaged with the worldwide old board revival. Winton suggests that what ‘men and women who are passionate about surfing’ can bring to the wider ‘grown up’ culture is ‘wisdom’, not ‘market share’. But this is just like Sando having Castaneda on his shelf and not knowing, as we now do, that Don Juan was a fiction of Castaneda’s imagination, and those shamanic experiences were written from the safety of Castaneda’s office in a Californian University as a way of making a living.

Surfing should not be tainted by commercialism suggests Winton – ‘the professional sport side’ of surfing is ‘mildly more interesting than golf’. But with this book is Winton not making a living from writing about surfing, and is that not to be applauded? How is this different from professional surfing? We would not be engaging so passionately with Tim Winton’s novella if it were not worth engaging with. Breath is a brilliant, but flawed, book and should add to Winton’s outstanding record of prize-winning novels. In the literary world it has been prizewinner, and undoubtedly the most successful novel on surfing. In my opinion Breath is certainly one of the best novels we currently have about surfing, and is written by a surfer. This is a must-read, and the book’s themes should be widely debated.