In the late 1960s the Australian National surfing champion, Keith Paull, came to my home town of Swansea to dodge the draft and the Vietnam War. I was a 12-year old surfer and he such a footwork genius that anything he said about Vietnam had to be right. I was politicised by him. In Breath, a similar transformation takes place and around the same era. Pickelet and his school friend Loonie are also 12 when they become beguiled by an older surfer called Sando who, like Paull, seduces them with “a skill that was something to behold”.

“We could have been staying back at school as army cadets, learning to fire mortars and machine guns...in preparation for a manhood that could barely credit the end of the war in Vietnam.” Instead Sando initiates the two friends into riding huge waves that “sounded like a battlefield” pounding the reef. They graduate to even bigger breaks, miles out at sea off the West Australian coast, where sharks lurk in wait for a little human snack.

Pickelet's parents, no more than shadows in the book, strongly disapprove of the ocean as a killing floor and he has to surf in secret, whereas Loonie's folks couldn't give a damn. The boys soon become consumed by the narcotic “primary thrill” of surfing. At first they dare only to watch the local Angelus crew surfing in the more treacherous conditions until Sando takes them beyond themselves.

An inscrutable hero, he reveals about as much emotion as Clint Eastwood in his Josey Wales phase. After witnessing his acolyte come close to drowning, all he can manage is: “Well, that one rang your bell.” Fall off big waves and they can pin you down for up to 60 seconds. That's the length of breath you'll need to survive.

Sando and his American girlfriend, Eva, live in a frame house on stilts with views of the surf. At first the boys are allowed to leave their boards only under the floor, but gradually are given access to the interior of the house, and to their complex lives. Winton is not so successful describing these characters at rest, and reverts to empty phrases from time to time. Sando is a man who “hadn't yet finished with himself.” About Eva, the narrator declares: “the awe in her voice unnerved me”. A former freestyle skiing champion until an accident took her off the slopes, Eva was as much defined by action as Sando. (“There was a warrior spirit in her.”) Now she just hangs around like Godot.

This is a very good book marred by occasional empty posturing and a poor finish, where everything Winton has set up so well folds into itself. The outward-looking characters become suddenly self-absorbed. Breathless action gives way to acts of auto-erotic asphyxiation - another play on the title, but which also invites associations with the demise of the Aussie rock singer Michael Hutchence. The narrator's transformation into a paramedic decades later seems an appendix to the story.

But don't let this quibble put you off. As with music, surfing is difficult to translate into language. On that level, Winton's first novel since the Booker shortlisted Dirt Music is as good as it gets. If you've had the real experience you will appreciate this achievement immediately. And if you have never heard that industrial sound of a huge wave disembowelling itself over a reef, or the way the ocean “clicks and rattles” - to use just one of hundreds of phrases from the novel - read it anyway, as a vivid and engaging elegy to lost youth.

Breath, by Tim Winton
Picador, £14.99 Buy the book here

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