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Breath (Tim Winton, Hamish Hamilton, $45 hb, ISBN 9780241015308, May) ****

It’s hard to think of an Australian writer, other than Peter Carey, who has pushed the boundaries of his fiction more emphatically than Tim Winton. It’s now more than 25 years since An Open Swimmer on the Vogel award, and a wonderful outpouring of novels, short stories, and children’s books followed. Always a writer for a big canvas, Winton has drawn on the natural world and the seascape in particular, consistently since that first book, through Cloudstreet and Dirt Music and The Turning for inspiration and evocation.

What to make of Breath, then, his first novel in seven years? Again, Winton’s gift for rendering something extraordinary out of ordinary lives is beautifully apparent. Again, that poetic rejoicing in the heroic freedom and power of nature is there. And again, the intense preoccupation with emotional challenges of characters connecting, surviving, redeeming their lives somehow is as  intense and powerful as ever.

This is a simple enough story on the surface: a coming-of-age tale set in a small community on the West Australian coast. Pikelet (that’s the inspired name of our first-person narrator) is a loner, an only child to shy parents. His life and growth through adolescence is figured largely through his connection to the sea, and surfing in particular. I can’t imagine anybody writing better about surfing than Winton, both as an amazing physical experience and a spiritual rite of passage, and it’s a risky feat of fiction to devote so much of a short novel to such an intense process. But it’s his gift to take such breathtaking and unrelenting natural forces and work his characters’ place in relation to them that makes Winton such an exceptional writer.

On its own however, that achievement, bold as it is, wouldn’t set him apart. As is often the case in Winton’s work, there are only a few characters in the novel and here their relationships are viewed through the recall of a middle-aged narrator. The wild, wild sea is what might connect them on the surface, but the one word title of the book holds a clue to so much more. Because so much of life happens below the surface and to survive one must draw breath. Pikelet survives, but the pain and the wounds, the emotional suffering are all too evident.

This is as powerful and heart-rending a story about youth as you’ll find. It will stay with you.

David Gaunt is co-owner of Gleebooks in Sydney

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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