KEY POINTS:
Elegant, colloquial and deceptively simple, Breath is Tim Winton's eighth novel. In it he returns to the landscape of The Turning and Dirt Music, the poor coastal towns of Angelus and Sawyer surrounded by low scrub and endless ocean.
This time he turns his attention more to the sea and more particularly to the two boys and man who surf it. They are Pikelet, almost 13 as the novel begins, his friend Loonie, the publican's feral son, and Sando, a famous surfie in his 30s.
Breath's characters and story hang in the reader's mind for days after finishing. Strangely and beautifully, it resonates more as a lengthy poem rather than a novel, perhaps because the notion behind it is so metaphorical and profound: breath and the fear of losing it. This is despite the voice not being particularly poetic and the sometimes heavy-handed Australianisms.
There are moments of sheer panic and terror among 6m waves, there is the breathless kind of sex that involves throttling and plastic bags. Pikelet tells us his story from the distance of being "nearly 50, arthritic and with a dud shoulder".
He remembers his wild mate Loonie with whom he became friends and competitors at the moment they realised they had both "perfected the art of riverside panic". At 12, they dive to the bottom and hang on to the tree roots, early free-divers earning the consternation of any watching adult. Soon after they start surfing the Point and meet Sando, who becomes for them a kind of guru - tall, curly-haired, bearded, and brave.
Sando reads Jack London, Conrad, Melville and Cousteau and lives out of town with his sad American girlfriend Eva, an injured professional skier. Through the innocent, adoring eyes of Pikelet, the pimply sensitive son of older parents, Sando takes vivid shape.
A tight bond forms between the surfer and his acolytes, whom he encourages to ride increasingly dangerous breaks. Barney is terrifying enough with its resident 14-foot White Pointer, and the waves on Old Smoky are so huge they lift with the "sound of sheetmetal shearing itself to pieces".
But the Nautilus induces a breathless panic even in the reader - a "shipkiller" three miles out to sea, surf rises on this ugly rock to colossal height. "Being afraid proves you're alive and awake," says Sando. This is where you "bargain with God". It's where Pikelet realises he is, "after all, ordinary".
Winton describes the sea in all its moods. He is apposite on the male ethos of the 70s (that you risked your life and kept quiet about it; that you don't describe your loneliness or horror to others) even though that ethos was about to change, possibly forever.
Pikelet's recollection is full of the colour of that decade, the Brewer boards, budgie smugglers, bodyshirts and bands such as The Sweet and Status Quo. While Sando and Loonie are once again away surfing without him in Indo-nesia, 15-year-old Pikelet has an affair with bored, 25-year-old Eva. It is she who introduces him to another whole concept of breathlessness.
Economically, without fuss, Winton lets the reader know how damaging this association was to Pikelet's life, at least until he has got to the point of being able to recall it. There is no self-pity in Pikelet's story, more a laconic vulnerability and gentle humour.
Breath is a work of great spirituality. In some cultures breath is regarded as an expression of the soul, or even the soul itself. Winton is a writer of magnitude.
* Stephanie Johnson is an Auckland writer.
Breath
By Tim Winton (Hamish Hamilton $50)
