Books
Risk aversion
by Guy Somerset
The perils of surfing excitement – and cautious writing.
Tim Winton’s Breath is such a well-turned novel – in the manner, indeed, of the stories in The Turning, his last book – that it seems almost churlish to reach the end and feel so disappointed. But a patness has started to creep into Winton’s working of his two inches of ivory – or, rather, 2.5 million square kilometres, his recurring terrain being Western Australia.
There is something a little too familiar – especially after The Turning – about the keening tone in which Breath is narrated by yet another Winton male recalling the small-town mateships of his adolescence from the lonely ruins of middle age.
The reader is left keening, too – for the different promise of such long-ago Winton novels as Cloudstreet (1991) and The Riders (1994).
Were it not for them, one might not be so tempted to complain, but those books did suggest an ambition absent from Breath.
This is despite its insistent theme – the inherent human yearning for excitement and its corollaries, risk and fear (“Being scared is half the fun”); and the anguish of accommodating oneself to the passing of that excitement.
And it is despite the ingenious emblematic uses to which Winton puts his novel’s title – the control of breath (and loss of control of it) being fundamental to the story in a very real sense, but there also being a more metaphorical application of it, with references to “the monotony of drawing breath” and lines such as: “When I was born … I took a breath and wanted more.”
The ruined 40-something this time is Bruce Pike; the small-town adolescent mateships he recalls are those in the 1970s with ne’er-do-well teenage best friend Loonie and – more complicatedly and disastrously – glamorous quasi-hippie older couple Sando and Eva.
Sando is a surfing hero approaching his own middle age and pushing himself and his two new acolytes on to ever greater and more dangerous feats at sea. He is a “delicious enigma” and an alluring figure for Bruce (or Pikelet – this being Australia, this being Winton) in a town where “people seemed settled – rusted on, in fact” and where Bruce’s parents were “so quiet and orderly that only a few years after they were both dead and buried few Sawyer locals could remember much about them”.
Eva, in her mid-20s, is an American former freestyle skier crippled out of the sport and unable to cope with the loss: “How can you get ’em back on the farm once they’ve seen Paree.” Her alternative source of risk and excitement proves even more perilous – both physically and -spiritually.
It is hard to think of anywhere you might find better writing about surfing: either in fiction or outside it; either the “useless beauty” of the act itself or the bigger existential questions surrounding it.
And Winton is master of the deft description, able to sketch a character’s background, or evoke a landscape, in a few sentences: “There were no mighty canyons or mile-wide rivers here. Without soaring peaks and snow, angels seemed unlikely and God barely possible.”
Seldom breaking out of his spare vernacular, he nonetheless gives voice to moments of poetic precision: an orgasmic cry “like a bloke who’d just dropped something in the street”; “It was dark in that hut, black as dog’s guts.”
But the way Winton’s plot enacts his theme so literally, not to say sensationally, is too schematic.
And the raw honesty of the novel’s sex scenes is undermined by the pages that spell out the corruption of innocence they represent – appropriate, perhaps, for one of Winton’s young adult novels, but not for an older readership well able to come to the same conclusion themselves.
In some ways, Winton’s writing is enacting Breath’s theme, too: that the cost of exposing yourself to too much risk is too high, that you should settle for some but not too much.
Now, that’s fine for surfing and freestyle skiing, maybe even for life, but perhaps it prevents a novelist from showing us what he’s really capable of.
BREATH, by Tim Winton (Hamish Hamilton, $50).
