BREATH

author:
TIM WINTON

Fiction
224 pages
FSG

Still water runs deep, it’s said, whereas the kind of water one surfs—curling, glass-walled water, a hollow of serenity tucked inside a roaring snarl—apparently runs turbulently and dangerously over shark-populated reefs. On the fraught knife-edge between surface and turmoil is where characters live in Tim Winton’s Breath, a lean and taut novel with prose that crests and crashes in impressive resonance with its promising but ultimately tragic subjects.

Bruce Pike, the novel’s narrator, and Loonie, his best friend (yes, he’s pretty loony), ride their bikes to the Australian coast and discover surfing. “How strange it was to see men do something beautiful,” Bruce writes, “Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared.” And it’s not long before Bruce and Loonie are both hooked by the rush and smitten by Sanbo, a veteran of worldwide big waves, who takes the boys under his wing and takes their boards under his beach house.

A quest for bigger, ever dangerous waves ensues. The surfers are junkies, really. The first pleasant hits of surfing, like crack, aren’t enough; addiction soon sinks its teeth. Bruce spends plenty of time weighing ordinary vs. extraordinary, and to be extraordinary, in his reckoning, requires a recklessness that Bruce envies but can’t wholly embody. So he’s always slightly to the outside, the one floating on his board as Loonie and Sanbo hurl themselves into increasingly foreboding waves.

Bruce is left behind, too, when Loonie and Sanbo go on extended surfing (and drug-running?) trips to Indonesia. This leaves the young protagonist alone with Eva, Sanbo’s fragile, angry wife, a former freestyle skier who now hangs in a desperate, backwards lunge toward the old quicksilver climax of flight-on-skis. As Eva’s presence increases in the novel, Winton’s story dives toward sordid. The halcyon days on the surface of the waves are over, and Bruce is ripped into the undertow where the true natures of mentors and best friends are revealed, and where a simple breath can become something priceless, then distant, then lost.

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