Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2596 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
'Winton's way with a breaking wave shows off all the springy dash of his action-laden prose. Yet, much as Pikelet adores the sea, what lends Breath its buzz is the kid's rite-of-passage rendezvous with love and sex.'
--Independent

Review
A simple story effortlessly told, and deeply satisfying snapshot of growing up near the surf.

Sunday Times, Culture
'Breath is an innocent, lyrical celebration of masculinity and physical prowess of a kind that is rare in British fiction.'

Customer Reviews

Gnarly
This is the best book I've ever read about surfing. But apart from that, it's also a beautiful novel about how you grow up to be the person you are, and what experiences make you; and the descriptions of the natural landscape of Australia are gawpingly gorgeous.

Everything I found frustrating about Peter Carey's last book was made exactly right in this stunning book from Tim Winton. I already loved his writing on the basis of Dirt Music, where he was preoccupied with a coastal Australian town similar to Sawyer (I don't think the name can be an accident, as the book is all about boys' adventures). We hear the story from Pikelet's point of view, a lonely young boy on the fringes of growing up, who makes friends with a bit of a danger merchant called Loonie.

Winton's characters are often self-sufficient loners who can't talk about their feelings, and reading him dealing with the technical problems of writing down the thoughts of someone fairly inarticulate is impressive on its own.

But add in the power Winton has to describe the ocean in all its different moods, glassy on a calm day, deafening in a swell, and all the tensions of boyhood relationships moving into being a young man... And then the meditation which runs all the way through about the human ability to take risks in life, and what the desire for risk and adventure means.

Quietly moving, faultlessly written, gets right into your heart.

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.

Far better than I was expecting
Bruce `Pikelet' Pike is a young boy growing up in an old-fashioned Australian town. He chafes against the stuffy and unexciting lifestyle of his parents and their peers, but is only when he befriends local wild boy `Loonie' that he breaks out and discovers the joys of surfing. And when Pikelet and Loonie are taken under the wing of older surfer Sando, they learn the joy of pushing oneself to the limit, and challenging all boundaries.

By the time I got around to reading this novel, I couldn't remember what had attracted me to it in the first place- I'm certainly not interested in surfing, and the idea of an entire book based around it sounded more than a little dull. Fortunately, I put aside my reservations for long enough to get started, and before I knew it, I was hooked. An involving character piece, Breath goes deep into the psychology of the surfer, pushing its protagonists to ever greater extremes and seeing who thrives under the pressure, and who pulls back from the brink.

Unfortunately, whilst the surfing part of the story is surprisingly absorbing, the book does lose momentum a little towards the end, with the focus switching rather sharply to Pikelet's relationship with Sando's wife Eva. At this point, the story feels like little more than padding, ending with a slightly abrupt conclusion to everything that had come before. Even so, the bulk of the novel is so good that I can forgive it for slipping a little at the end.

Overall, this is one novel I can certainly recommend- even if you aren't into surfing, there is plenty of good material here. Once you get swept along by its compulsively readable style, you'll be glad you gave it a chance.