Just finished Tim Winton's new novel, Breath. It won the Miles Franklin Award, and you can see why. Breath tells the story of two teenagers in Western Australia in the 1970s who test their limits by (among other things) surfing ever more dangerous waves. The ending was darker - the characters more damaged by what happens to them - than I wanted, but it rings true throughout. Indeed, it sings: his writing is of an almost magical precision and power (even though there's no magical realism in this novel, as in the lovely Cloudstreet). In particulat, his writing about water is stunning. I felt I was in the water as I read it, feeling its power. I felt swells lift me, shadows of reefs open under me, waves roll by overhead as I watched them from below. I felt the gut-fear when a wave is about to cream you. (That these were my own body memories being kindled is confirmed by the fact that specific surfing experience I haven't had didn't move me in the same way, though I took them on faith.) But Winton's novel is so perfectly paced that I felt the waves even when they weren't being described. I could hear the distant booming of surf which the boys hear from their beds at night as storms approach. Indeed, I found I was aware of the surf pounding away at the outer limits of my own sensorium even during a few days when I wasn't reading the novel. Just like the protagonists I was thrilled and haunted by the surf and all it connotes of a wider, mysterious, dangerous world. (Strangely I gave my post on John Bullitt's recordings of the sounds of the earth, including the sound of surf, the title of a Tim Winton novel, albeit one I haven't yet read.)
Maybe I was just unhappy with its ending because Winton spends less time at the end with the sea. The narrator's life has gone off the rails because of the continuing repercussions of extreme experiences when he was fifteen but has returned to a kind of equilibrium, though not the kind of harmony I thought he was heading toward. Surfing's still part of his life, but it doesn't sustain him. (Many days the sea down there is flat.) That's his point, I suppose. Harmony isn't in the cards for some - perhaps most - of us, or not in the ways and places we hope for. Even our own breathing remains an obscure mystery, an effortless effort whose wonder (like time in Augustine's Confessions) we get only when we don't have to try to understand it. Some programmatic lines:
It's funny, but you never really think much about breathing. Until it's all you ever think about. ... as a youth you do sense that life renders you powerless by dragging you back to it, breath upon breath upon breath in an endless capitulation to biological routine, and that the human will to control is as much about asserting power over your own body as exercising it on others. (42-43)
I'm not sure I ever felt that powerlessness, which may be why I never sought the experiences of power Winton's characters seek. (Or maybe I experienced it as mediated by culture, but that would be a whole separate discussion.) Anyway, it's interesting that the narrator's playing a didgeridoo as he reflects on the "enigma of respiration," so there is a release, a harmony of some kind after all: the wind comes through me in circles, like a memory, one breath, without pause, hot and long. (42)
