Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4834 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.

Occasional good bits, but mostly a waste of all too precious reading time
The opening seven pages set the scene for this novel very carefully. Two paramedics, who do not have the best of working relationships, arrive at a suburban house in response to an emergency call. They find a distraught family facing the fact that their teenage son has just apparently committed suicide by hanging himself. Despite the fact that the scene has all the hallmarks of a suicide, the more senior paramedic, the narrator of the novel, suggests to his partner as they drive away that it was not suicide but an accident.

After this enticing beginning I eagerly turned the pages to continue with the story, only to find a sudden flashback to the narrator at 11 years old and his introduction to surfing, a subject which dominates the next couple of hundred or so pages. Much of Tim Winton's writing is influenced by the West Australian landscape, and there are some fine descriptive passages here (hence the 2 star rather than 1), but having no personal interest in surfing, most of this, especially the esoteric jargon, was completely lost on me and indeed was so dreary that I almost gave up on the book.

Then at 15, he is 'deflowered' by his surfing guru's 25 year old wife, adding not very original 'coming of age' and 'sun, sand, sea and sex' twists to the tale. But as their relationship progresses (?) she talks him into pretending to strangle and suffocate her during sex to enhance her orgasm. He learns to recognise the type of bruising left on her by this if accidentally done a little too enthusiastically. Then in indecent haste, the final 15 pages or so of the book deal with the rest of his life - marriage, children, separation, mental illness, the death of his former lover and friend, rehab, recovery, a new life. When he becomes a paramedic, this gives him the same buzz as surfing used to. I finished the book thinking 'so what' and wishing that I had followed my instinct and given up on it early. An incredibly dull book for a writer twice short listed for the Booker Prize.