Breath REVIEW
Tim Winton’s Breath is a story about addiction. Not to drugs or booze but to danger and adrenaline. It is about two Australian boys who are introduced to the chemical highs of surfing beyond the limits of safety. Pikelet and Loonie are in their early teens when they first earn the money to buy surfboards and soon they are initiated into the thrills of extreme surfing by a grizzled surfer hippie by the name of “Sando.” The two boys remind me somewhat of Phinney and Gene in John Knowles’ A Separate Peace. Pickelet loves the thrill of a challenge just beyond him but Loonie is – well – loonie. He backs down for nothing. His addiction has no good sense counterbalancing it. “Loonie went first out of need,” the narrator writes of his boyhood friend, “He was greedy about risk.”
Loonie thrives on fear and the more danger in the situation that inspires it, the better. Pikelet finds that sweet spot where enough is enough but Loonie never does. There is a certain irony to how Loonie has to ride his board to the brink of death and beyond to live. Pikelet understands it and feels the pull of it but something sensible in him draws him back before it is too late. Still, he is nostalgic. In a sort of involuntary suicide wish, he seems to wish he could sacrifice himself to the storm.
“I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living,” he says of the moment when he takes himself as far as he is willing to physically go for a shot of this fear. Loonie can’t find that limit though. For him, surfing beyond what is safe is like heroin to him. “His lip was split from grinning,” Pikelet tells us after one surfing adventure that Loonie launches himself into. “He’d ridden his wave all the way to the beach. There was a glory about him. He was untouchable.”
“He hurled himself at the world,” Pikelet says of Loonie.
“There have been times since when I have thought of him as an endless and rather aimless reservoir of physical bravery … He surfed like someone who didn’t believe in death. . . . Loonie was often a triumph of guts over technique.”
The boys, egged on by the rather irresponsible Sando, push themselves into ever greater danger in their sport. Pikelet hangs back but understands the allure. “You’ll be out there thinkin: Am I gunna die? Am I fit enough for this? Do I know what I am doin?” he explains, “Am I solid? Or am I just ordinary?”
Of these moments of risk, he confesses, “You feel alive. Completely awake and in your body.” “There was such an intoxicating power to be had from doing things that no one else dared try” he exclaims, “Surviving is the strongest memory I have. . . . Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room of sleepers.”
Breath plays a significant role in the novel. It begins with the boys holding their breath underwater, seeing which of them could come closest to drowning. The narrator speaks of the way that the life of school and routine suffocates a person, “Dragging you back to it, breath upon breath upon breath in an endless capitulation to biological routine.” And there is more.
The story line takes us to the top of a wave of increasing risk and then … drops us and drags us onto the beach as it were. The author gets to the point where he can no longer risk dying for a greater thrill and it almost seems like his life is over and then, he is fifty, looking back at his life and seeing “life after danger” as no life at all. “I miss being afraid. That’s the honest truth,” Sando’s girlfriend says to Pikelet. It is no wonder that Pikelet becomes an EMT. There is something I the thrill of living close to dying that he never escapes.
Question for Comment: When is the last time you felt exhilarated? How dangerous does a situation have to be for it to satisfy that need?
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