The connections Breath draws between various sorts of risk-taking and addiction are persuasive, within the context of the novel and more broadly.Īnd while Winton is not the only writer to have plumbed this dark side of surfing - the American Kem Nunn, whose work Winton has himself praised, has built a career around depicting the macho world of surfing with chilling accuracy - Breath's looping structure and glancing depiction of the damage wrought on Pikelet lends its questions about the cost of such behaviour real poignancy.Today’s book excerpt is a continuation piece of a review I wrote of Tim Winton’s classic Australian novel ‘Breath’.

For as Pikelet comes to realise, surfing may be beautiful but it is also something more: a pretext for a particular kind of male (and, as the ruined freestyler Eva demonstrates, sometimes female) risk-taking behaviour a need for danger that is in its own way as addictive as drugs or drink or any one of a range of self-destructive behaviours. Yet simultaneously this lyric imagination is given heft by the darkness behind it. Time and again his descriptions of the ocean and the littoral break free of the page, revealing this landscape with a clarity and an intimacy that lets us see it anew. It's unlikely Winton has ever written as well as he writes in Breath, a book that marries the lyricism of work such as Cloudstreet to the adamantine hardness of the stories in The Turning. His writing stripped back and compressed into something close to raggedness, Winton painted a portrait of the slow dying of a community and of the human cost of that process that exceeded anything he had written before a book that distils moments of clarity and even wonder out of the wreckage and pain of the lives at its centre. In Winton's last book, the remarkable collection of short stories, The Turning, this need to escape was married to a gradually tightening claustrophobia. Whether it is a girl with a finger lost in an accident in a story such as Abbreviation or the shattered Luther in Dirt Music, almost to a one, Winton's characters are caught in a struggle with the fact of their pasts and more particularly with their own need to blot out or escape those pasts whether through drugs or drink or simply a retreat from the world around them and themselves. I say misunderstood because Winton's subject is darker and more troubling.įor, in many ways, it is the idea of damage - personal, psychic, physical - that Winton returns to time and again and it is this undercurrent of pain that lends his often fractured narratives their urgency and brooding power. I often suspect Tim Winton is sometimes misunderstood as a sort of poet of the beach, a creator of sprawling epics inflected by the grandeur of the landscape they inhabit.

Tim winton's novel breath