Breath

If an Australian novel about surfing, narrated by a man called Bruce, sounds to you like a cliché-laden experience best left on the shelf next to a stubby of Victoria beer, think again:

Tim Winton is one of the finest authors currently at work anywhere in the world, and Breath builds upon his reputation for writing novels that carefully pick away at relationships which exist in the context of almost overpowering landscape.

Like the Norwegian bestseller Berlin Poplars, also published in the UK in 2008, Breath opens with the suicide of a teenage boy. Bruce Pike, a paramedic, is called to a suburban home to take the body to hospital. Bruce has a reputation for being arrogant, aloof and sexist, and his manner with the dead boy’s mother does little to allay his fellow paramedic’s suspicions that he is ‘a strange man’.

In fact, the suicide brings back to Bruce vivid memories of his adolescence, when breath – its eternal going in and coming out, what happens at its limits – played a central role in everything he did.

Growing up in a mill town, Bruce – like everyone else – learned to swim in the river. His father was afraid of the sea and wouldn’t take him beyond the estuary. A ‘lone child and solitary by nature,’ Bruce is nevertheless drawn into the orbit of Loonie, an edgy boy who holds his breath under water to scare helpless girls into thinking he has drowned.

Thus begins a friendship, based almost purely on the will to win: ‘It was the beginning of something. We scared people, pushing each other harder and further until often as not we scared ourselves.’

As the boys grow older, and are in turn drawn into the orbit of the awe-inspiring surfer Sando and his intriguing but bitter girlfriend, Eva, the stakes become higher and the rewards for risking themselves more treacherous.

Winton, like the underrated Paul Watkins, writes beautiful, spare prose about how men behave with each other, particularly the way in which inarticulacy leads to silence, repressed emotions and rage (a common and terrifying theme that runs through much of Winton’s writing).

He is also spectacularly good at describing the elemental power of the sea and its indifference to the humans who try to ride it:

‘I didn’t understand how wildly I’d overreached myself until the moment I got to my feet and felt the whole edifice bulge and mutate beneath me … I was falling down a staircase – one that never seemed to end, which collapsed on me and shot me skyward before snatching me down again so its rubble-spill might drive me headlong across the reef, rattling and wracking all the way.’

This is life, with all its vicious disdain for order, and Winton knows how to describe it better than most.