“Breath” by Tim Winton

Breath by Tim Winton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I’ve never been an adrenaline junkie. No, thanks. Facing my own mortality just makes me feel dread and not that rush that gets others addicted. I never needed to face dangers and thrills in order to feel alive — I like calm and have seen too many people end up broken because of thrill-seeking.

I do love the ocean though, but mostly the beach and the very spot where the waves gently touch the beach. Surfers are fun to watch from solid ground, but the closest I ever wanted to get to the experience was by grabbing a boogie board when the waves are at best suitable for five-year-olds. In the pull and push between extraordinary and ordinary I go for ordinary and I’m not even sorry.

So that’s me, and this here is Tim Winston’s Breath centered on adrenaline-addicted surfers in Australia. On the surface it starts as a coming-of-age novel but then morphs into a trauma that shaped a man’s life. Seeking surfing thrills in a small town in the 1970s with a local surfing guru (living off family money, just to be clear), with at least one of these adolescents getting in way above his head, metaphorically speaking.

“I watched the weather maps and waited for Sando, perpetually in a state of anguished anticipation. Somehow I’d gotten used to a certain underlying level of fear. When it was gone I missed it. After a huge day at Barney’s or a rare session at Old Smoky I came home charged — the euphoria lasted for days. But when it dissipated I became restless, even anxious. I couldn’t concentrate at school. Whenever I condescended to go fishing on the estuary, the old man complained that I twitched and jiggled like an alky, that I wrecked a good morning out.”

It’s a book about obsession, more than just one kind, that can swallow you whole if you let it. About “want” becoming “need” so slowly that you don’t even see that morphing. It becomes your identity, religiously, your entire life — and it may break you in the ways that you still struggle to explain years later. (And no, it’s not the surfing — it’s the people).

“Sando was good at portraying the moment you found yourself at your limit, when things multiplied around you like an hallucination. He could describe the weird, reptilian thing that happened to you: the cold, supercharged certainty which overtook your usually dithering mind, the rest of the world in a slow-motion blur around you, the tunnel vision, the surrender that confidence finally became. And when he talked about the final rush, the sense of release you felt at the end, skittering out to safety in the beautiful deep channel, Eva sometimes sank back with her eyes closed and her teeth bared, as though she understood only too well.
It’s like you come pouring back into yourself, said Sando one afternoon. Like you’ve exploded and all the pieces of you are reassembling themselves. You’re new. Shimmering. Alive.
Yes, she said. Exactly.
And I watched her, and wondered how she knew.”

It’s written well, although I confess I had to look up a few Australian words in total confusion. Winston is good at putting words together in such a way that even this getting-ankles-wet ocean lover could actually feel the depths and the waves and the sheer terror at recklessly stupid courage that borders on insanity. Healthy amount of fear is present in our brains for a reason, or so I’m telling myself when I refuse to get in deeper than my toes can touch. And yet Winston’s descriptions of water almost lured me into driving to the ocean on the cold day in the rain (note I said almost; I’m not actually obsessed). Success and failure and the pain that perception or misperception of both can bring; recklessness suspended between courage and sheer irresponsibility; and need of some to feel alive by apparently cheating death.

“Death was everywhere — waiting, welling, undiminished. It would always be coming for me and for mine and I told myself I could no longer afford the thrill of courting it.”

But then the last part came and I found it hard to read. Pikelet’s second obsession, after surfing, was painful to witness and made me sigh and cringe. It’s uncomfortable reading, sad because, unlike Pikelet, we see what’s happening and why, and how the cracks it starts will reverberate. (I would have trimmed that section to a quarter of its length at most, but that’s just because there’s a limit of how much discomfort in my reading I’m comfortable with).

“And there was something careless about her that I mistook for courage in the same way I misread Sando’s vanity as wisdom.”

I found it not an easy read with the moments of wonder and elation interspersed with discomfort and exasperation and thanking the world for feeling more mature and grounded and less dependent of the reckless thrill than the book’s characters. And yet the ending scenes, told by a man who managed to somewhat mend the breaks and cracks are full of magic, even if born from heartbreak and life giving you one hell of a beating against the rocks of the ocean floor.

“My favourite time is when we’re all at the Point, because when they see me out on the water I don’t have to be cautious and I’m never ashamed. Out there I’m free. I don’t require management. They probably don’t understand this, but it’s important for me to show them that their father is a man who dances — who saves lives and carries the wounded, yes, but who also does something completely pointless and beautiful, and in this at least he should need no explanation.”

3.5 stars.

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