Small-town coastal Australia is the setting for Tim Winton's haunting eighth novel. It is a place of stagnation and limited opportunities where for some the only escape is the ocean itself. Bruce Pike (“Pikelet”), the narrator, grows up listening at night to its roar: “I used to get out of bed and lie on the karri floorboards and feel the rumble in my skull. There was a soothing monotony in the sound. It sang in every joist of the house, in my very bones...”

When he becomes friends with the town's wild-boy, Ivan Loon (“Loonie”), he seizes the opportunity to overcome his parents' misgivings and hurl himself into that oceanic roar: surfing becomes his life. Together, Loonie and Pikelet attach themselves to an older mentor figure, an enigmatic and fearless rider of the waves called Sando. Under his guidance, the boys venture out into ever deeper and more treacherous waters, testing themselves and each other against their fears. Risk becomes a drug which they need more and more.

Looked at reductively, Breath is an old and familiar tale - a Bildungsroman of the kind that has attracted numberless novelists and screenwriters. The growing protagonist overcomes a succession of obstacles, learning lessons about life from them and guided - or led astray - by mentors both malign and benevolent. (In Pikelet's case, there is also Sando's American wife, who becomes a dark sexual mentor to him.) Boiled down to that, it is one of those formats beloved of how-to Hollywood story gurus such as Robert McKee.

However, in the hands of an immensely skilful and experienced novelist such as Winton, the old stories can often be the most powerful. In the first place, the milieu is established with cinematic presence - the endless adolescent summers spent messing around in the water, the winter storms that saturate the coast with the spray of surf. Above all, there is the physical experience - the rush - of surfing, which Winton captures with what reads like first-hand knowledge. At one level, Breath is an innocent, lyrical celebration of masculinity and physical prowess of a kind that is rare (Why? An interesting question) in British fiction: “These blokes dancing themselves across the bay with smiles on their faces and sun in their hair...How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared.”

And then, having established this blissed-out idyll of sun and sea, this splendour among the waves, Winton darkens the mood and cranks up the tension with a sure, slow hand. As the tests set for them by Sando grow riskier - the waves ever bigger - the relationship between the boys sours as the competitiveness between them develops an ugly edge. They are now competing for the approval of the older man. In the end, he breaks them apart, and his wife's sexual appetite finishes off the job of destroying the idyll. Breath belongs to that sub-genre of the Bildungsroman (LPHartley's The Go-Between, Henry James's What Maisie Knew and The Turn of the Screw) that sees adulthood's relationship with the child as essentially a corrupting one.

What finally raises Breath above the clichés of the genre is the powerful way in which key imagery (implied in the title) animates the narrative. In this respect, it is very much a “literary” novel, with its effects artfully, perhaps a little too artfully, orchestrated. The first adventures in risk that are undertaken by the boys, before they launch themselves on the ocean waves, involve competitions whereby they hold their breath underwater, daring each other to step closer to the abyss of unconsciousness. When Pikelet has his erotic initiation at the hands of Sando's wife (herself another risk addict), the theme of self-suffocation acquires a dangerous sexual tow.

This itself is foreshadowed at the very start of the novel, when, now in middle age and working as a paramedic, Pike comes across a scene of adolescent auto-erotic asphyxiation. It is this scene that prompts his exploration of his personal paradise lost. The trigger may be more brutal than Proust's madeleine, but Winton's subtle, elegant telling of that exploration holds the elements of innocence and experience, adventure and self-destruction, in a convincingly and delicately mysterious balance, making for a novel that lingers long in the mind.

Breath by Tim Winton
Picador £14.99 pp216

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