Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Tim Winton
Picador 2009
Before I read Breath, I don’t think I’d ever read anything about surfing, with the possible exception of That Summer, a teen film tie in from the late seventies which I now discover was set in Torquay and therefore probably not about surfing at all. I still haven’t been converted to surfing – I can’t swim after all – but nevertheless I liked this novel immensely. Winton tells how Bruce Pike and his unfortunately named friend Loonie are both affected forever by their friendship with a much older surfer in a small Australian town in the 1970s. The descriptions of surfing are very convincing, as are the
development of character and the depiction of teenage years. Though I am probably the last person in the world who would be tempted by sport, let alone the extreme sport and high octane thrills favoured here, the lure of fear is well depicted too. Pike’s sexual coming of age is also well handled (as it were) and the whole novel is excitingly well-written. However, although by framing the story from Pike’s adult perspective, Winton emphasises how teenage intensity is lost and sometimes mourned (as he writes of Pike’s daughters: “it’s important for me to show them that their father is a man who dances ….. who …. does something completely pointless and beautiful and in this at least he should need no explanation”), I did wonder if this wouldn’t have been even better and more focused without the twenty or so pages of catch-up we get once the main story has ended. That aside, this is still a very good novel indeed.
28 March 2010
http://breath.timwinton.com.au/
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