Like Hardy’s Wessex or Faulkner’s Mississippi, the Western Australian
landscape has been consecrated by Tim Winton’s fiction. He has been
garlanded with literary awards and acclaim in his native Australia, and has
been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His work is preoccupied with
wounded or troubled characters, often haunted by their past, who set out on
actual or psychological journeys in search of purpose, meaning and
redemption. Dirt Music (2002) depicts a vast, hostile outback in which the
individual self is tiny and threatened. In Breath, the sea takes on a
comparable role as an immense elemental force that simultaneously compels
and controls the protagonists.
The story is told by Bruce Pike, a middle-aged paramedic, recollecting the
adventures of his adolescence. The action takes place in and around Sawyer,
a small mill town near the mouth of a river. For “Pikelet” and his friend
Ivan Loon (“Loonie”), the sea promises exhilaration, risk, excitement, an
alluring alternative to the staid routines of their parents’ lives. When
they fall in with a mentor, “Sando”, a surfing maestro in his thirties, a
triangle of male yearning, rivalry and betrayal develops.
This novel is a paean to surfing. But it will not only be savoured by those
with sun-bleached hair and rippling torsos. It treats elemental themes of
fear and friendship, loneliness and boredom, the lure and danger of life
lived intensely, the broken promises of adolescence sliding into middle age.
Sando and his wife, Eva, are labelled as hippies. Yet there is nothing
peace-loving or egalitarian about their self-destructive cravings. This is
not so much a community as a hierarchy of signal individuals: an elite.
Pikelet is something of a loner and, we learn early on, avoids “teamsports
of any kind”. Sando has an insouciant “princely manner”, and is compared to
a Brahmin and a matador. He and his two apprentices are, for Sando,
“discreet gentlemen” seeking out “appointments with the undisclosed”.
Surfing, here, is a hermetic arena of self-mastery and the exquisite thrill of
private fear. It is not just an art form, but a radically aesthetic life
choice, a spurning of the drudgery and tedium of day-to-day life and work in
small-town Sawyer: “How strange it was to see men do something beautiful.
Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared”.
Pikelet and Sando contrast the glories of surfing with the merely “ordinary”.
Sando mentors the two friends to ever more dangerous surfing challenges,
culminating in the Nautilus, a fearsome wave break many miles off the coast.
Surfing, initially about “dancing on water”, moves now to the terror and
immensity of the sublime. The trio attempt to live more fully, embarking on
a chill overture to self-destruction and oblivion. “We surfed to fool with
death”, ruminates the older Pikelet. This deathly undertow comes into focus
later on as the novel progresses from surfing to sexuality.
If there is a hierarchical, aristocratic aspect to surfing, the deathliness
that shadows its appeal in this novel also evokes a fascist aesthetic. The
hunt for more and more hazardous waves to conquer indicates an aspiration
towards an ineffable, mystic extremity, at once terrifying and swathed in a
rhetoric of purity. The blond and buffed heroes of surfing are, after all,
in many ways comparable to Übermensch, their feats of daring and mastery of
a higher order than those of the “ordinary” people. There is nothing
communal about the surfing impulse here.
In her 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism”, Susan Sontag sought to articulate the
fascist aesthetic: “Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and
a congealed, static, ‘virile’ posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it
exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death”. The aesthetic of surfing in
Breath clearly resonates here, especially in its combination of grace and
surrender, beauty and sublimity, movement and stillness:
"All about was seething vapour. I hung right up in the boiling nest of
foam at its very peak, suspended in noise and unbelief, before I began to
fall out and down in a welter of blinding spray. I only got to my feet from
instinct, but there I suddenly was, upright and alive, skittering in front
of all that jawing mess with my little board chattering underfoot. It was
hard to credit the speed, the way the wave hauled itself upright in my path
as it found shallower water. All I could do was squat and aim in hope. Yet
for all this mad acceleration there was still something ponderous about the
movement of the water."
The lonely hero, like the Arctic explorer or mountain climber, displays
self-control and submission. The fascist aesthetic is about the triumph of
power, the harmony between individual effort and vital, primitive forces.
When Pikelet fails and falls, as he always does eventually, it diminishes
and humiliates him. But, ultimately, it also humanizes and redeems him,
indicating the sensitive, self-reflective qualities that Loonie lacks, for
all his “feral” fearlessness.
The impulse of the characters is one of bohemian repudiation of dreary
bourgeois timidity. But they are also motivated by the drive for mastery and
control. As the narrator ponders, “the human will to control is as much
about asserting power over your own body as exercising it over others”. But
asserting control over one’s own body often purchases mental power at the
cost of physical danger. Sontag elaborates in her essay on the affinity
between sadomasochistic culture and fascist iconography. The thematic
concern in Breath with “extraordinary” surfing (Pikelet scorns the term
“extreme sports”) segues into a much darker form of ecstatic self-mastery:
that of auto-asphyxiation for the purposes of sexual pleasure.
The theme is foreshadowed throughout. The novel opens with the middle-aged
Pikelet as a paramedic arriving at the scene where a young man has hanged
himself. Unlike his younger colleague, Pikelet knows instantly that this is
no suicide. The experience is the occasion for his recollections of youth
that make up the rest of the novel. The motif of breathing in various
formations and deformations is pervasive. The sea itself is like the ebb and
flow of respiration, “The way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing
in air”. But if the sea is like a respiring body, the allure of the surf is
also a “rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath” and a stand
against the “endless capitulation to biological routine”. Pikelet’s father
disturbs his son through his loud snoring and apnoea. When they first meet,
Pikelet and Loonie train themselves to hold their breath under water in the
river in order to frighten onlookers. The boys at Loonie’s school play games
involving hyperventilation and making each other faint. The arrest of
breathing becomes at once the risk to life but also how life is made more
conscious and more aware: “It’s funny, but you never really think about
breathing. Until it’s all you ever think about”.
These urges to rout the routine, to grasp life two-handed, are well-suited to
early adolescence, when the wax of selfhood is still pliable, and still
yielding to untried impression and first experience. The two boys hunt
adventure with a sort of desperation, hungry for the exhilaration of fear,
the vitality of excess and extremity. The sensitivities and vulnerabilities
of adolescence are depicted here with deft and painful accuracy.
A tragic key in the novel, narrated as it is from the perspective of middle
age, is the loss of this youthful freshness. The middle-aged Pikelet,
remembering his first encounter with surfing, knows the experience can never
be reproduced. So it has become the ideal: “I still judge every joyous
moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living”.
The quiet delicacy and dignity of the narrative voice reflects another of its
dominant themes: the silence that often prevails in male friendship. “We
were mates but there were places where conversation simply couldn’t go.” In
this very male world of physical prowess and courage, talking or
self-revelation is dubiously effeminate. That credo also influences the
older Pikelet, who does not talk much to his paramedical colleagues and is
therefore regarded as arrogant and aloof. “I’ve bored people in bars and
lost a marriage to silence.” Though the memoir itself would appear to
contradict his claims of reticence and self-concealment, there is another
sense in which the narrative voice reproduces a certain stoic quality of
Pikelet. Its lyricism is exquisite but never effete or affected.
While Breath deals with primal, mythic conflicts – the clash of wilderness and
civilization, self and society, youth and age – it does not strain for epic
effect. The voice has a muted, even modest quality, betokening the
half-successful life that Pikelet goes on to live. There is struggle,
disappointment and survival, but no portentous tragic fall. It is a quiet,
feather-fingered style that nonetheless has the power to claw. For all the
ostensible hubris of the theme, Winton’s characters are too scarred and
thwarted for heroism, too typical to be archetypal. Pikelet comes to realize
that he is, in fact, ordinary but, as he suggests to Sando late in the
novel, “Maybe ordinary’s not so bad”.
Tim Winton
BREATH
215pp. Picador. £14.99.
978 0 330 45571 8
Rónán McDonald is Director of the Beckett International
Foundation and Senior Lecturer at the University of Reading. His latest book
is The Death of the Critic, 2007.
Love surfing. Understand the trill of a private fear. 20 meter
face wave and in the wrong spot ... pain!! I look forward to a
good read.
john, placentia, OC California
Having read and enjoyed 'Dirt Music' and 'Cloud Street', I enjoyed this insightful review of Winton's latest work. I look forward to getting my hands on a copy.
Andrea, Accra, Ghana