Breath (T. Winton)

Tim Winton Breath (2008)

My comments
1. The book excels in evoking life in a small town where nothing happens and no-one really changes. It’s not completely inward-looking - there’s recognition that changes are happening in ‘the world’. In this it resembles the only one of his many earlier books that I’ve read - The Turning (2004), ‘seventeen overlapping stories set in the brooding small-town world of Western Australia.’

2. Each of the two boys at the heart of the novel changes in different ways, but they’re the only characters who do.
1. Loonie goes progressively more wild, encouraged/provoked by Bill Sanderson (‘Sando’) … although it’s not clear just how. ‘Loonie died in Mexico, shot in a bar … not far from Tijuana. He surfed hard and lived hard and seemed to finance it all with drug scams and smuggling.’ (209).
2. Pikelet’s (Bruce Pike’s) surfing experiences with Sando and Loonie makes him harder in some ways yet more ‘philosophical’ in others. His sexual experiences with Eva Sanderson make him confused and eventually he ends up having a breakdown, although it’s unclear whether it’s as a direct result.

3. The absence of clear explanations (see ‘2’) offers the reader chances to fill-in the stories as they wish. In this way, the book is more engaging than one in which everything is clear-cut. It's theme is the pursuit of excitement and the avoidance of boredom and conformity - very 1960s!

4. I'm not sure that it SAYS anything significant. I came away from it with that feeling of life in a small town (as I did from The Turning), but with nothing much else. I didn't even learn much about surfing (!), because Winton wrote for people who know about it already, not for outsiders. (See Tim Baker's interview with Tim Winton on the Breath website. Here, Winton talks eloquently and informatively about surfing.) The only piece of substance was the celebration of 'men doing something pointless and elegant'. Maybe that can be applied to the book, too!