Breath
Tim Winton's Breath has been attracting oodles of media attention, so much so that, out of sheer pique and infantile jealousy, I'm tempted not to read it.
I jest. The universally good reviews suggest that Breath might even eclipse Kem Nunn's The Dogs of Winter; certainly, for anyone interested in surfing's interaction with literature, it is a must-read book.
By far the most interesting review I've read, to date, appeared in the Times Literary Supplement for 16 May 2008. It's by Dr Ronan McDonald, the Director of the Beckett International Foundation and Senior Lecturer at the University of Reading. It was originally published under the headline "Grace and surrender", with the strapline "Surfing and the fascist aesthetic". It's reproduced here by kind permission of Dr McDonald and the TLS.
Like Hardy's Wessex or Faulkner's Mississippi, the Western Australian landscape has been consecrated by Tim Winton's fiction. He has been garlanded with literary awards and acclaim in his native Australia, and has been twice short-listed for the Booker Prize in the UK. His work is preoccupied with wounded or troubled characters, often haunted by their past, who set out on actual or psychological journeys in search of purpose, meaning and redemption. Dirt Music (2002) depicts a vast, hostile outback in which the individual self is tiny and threatened. In Breath the sea takes on a comparable role, an immense elemental force that simultaneously compels and controls the protagonists.
The story is told by Bruce Pike, a middle-aged paramedic, recollecting the adventures of his adolescence. The action takes place in and around Sawyer, a small mill-town near the mouth of a river. For '"Pikelet"' and his friend Ivan Loon ("Loonie"), the sea promises exhilaration, risk, excitement, an alluring alternative to the staid routines of their parents' lives. When they fall in with a mentor, '"Sando", a surfing maestro in his thirties, a triangle of male yearning, rivalry and betrayal develops.
This novel is a paean to surfing. But it will not only be savoured by those of sun-bleached hair and rippling torsos. It treats elemental themes of fear and friendship, loneliness and boredom, the lure and danger of life lived intensely, the broken promises of adolescence sliding into middle age. Sando and his wife, Eva, are labelled as hippies. Yet there is nothing peace-loving or egalitarian about their self-destructive cravings. This is not so much a community as a hierarchy of signal individuals: an elite. Pikelet is something of a loner and, we learn early on, avoids "teamsports of any kind". Sando has an insouciant "princely manner", and is compared to a Brahmin and a matador. He and his two apprentices are, for Sando, "discreet gentlemen" seeking out "appointments with the undisclosed".
Surfing, here, is a hermetic arena of self-mastery and the exquisite thrill of private fear. It is not just an artform, but a radically aesthetic life choice, a spurning of the drudgery and tedium of day-to-day life and work in small-town Sawyer: "How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared".
Repeatedly, Pikelet and Sando oppose the glories of surfing to the merely "ordinary". Sando mentors the two friends to ever more dangerous surfing challenges, culminating in the Nautilus, a fearsome wave break many miles off the coast. Surfing, initially about "dancing on water", moves now to the terror and immensity of the sublime. If the trio attempt to live more fully, they are also embarking on a chill overture to self-destruction and oblivion. "We surfed to fool with death", ruminates the older Pikelet. This deathly undertow comes into focus later on as the novel progresses from surfing to sexuality.
The deathliness that haunts the novel indicates its concern not only with an aristocratic ethos but also with a quasi-fascist one. The hunt for more and more hazardous waves to conquer indicates an aspiration towards an ineffable, mystic extremity, at once terrifying and swathed in a rhetoric of purity. The blonde and buffed heroes of surfing are, after all, not incomparable to Ubermensch, their feats of daring and mastery of a higher order than that of the "ordinary" people. There is nothing communal about the surfing impulse here. "Charlie Don't Surf!" as Robert Duvall's air cavalry commander in Apocalypse Now puts it.
In her 1975 essay "Fascinating Fascism", Susan Sontag sought to
articulate the fascist aesthetic: "Its choreography alternates between
ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, 'virile' posing. Fascist art
glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death." The
aesthetic of surfing in Breath clearly resonates here, especially in
its combination of grace and surrender, beauty and sublimity, movement
and stillness:
All about was seething vapour. I hung right up in the boiling nest of
foam at its very peak, suspended in noise and unbelief, before I began
to fall out and down in a welter of blinding spray. I only got to my
feet from instinct, but there I suddenly was, upright and alive,
skittering in front of all that jawing mess with my little board
chattering underfoot. It was hard to credit the speed, the way the wave
hauled itself upright in my path as it found shallower water. All I
could do was squat and aim in hope. Yet for all this mad acceleration
there was still something ponderous about the movement of the water.
The lonely hero, like the Arctic explorer or mountain climber, displays self-control and submission. The fascist aesthetic is about the triumph of power, the harmony between individual effort and vital, primitive forces. When Pikelet fails and falls, as he always does eventually, it diminishes and humiliates him. But, ultimately, it also humanizes and redeems him, indicating the sensitive, self-reflective qualities that Loonie lacks, for all his "feral" fearlessness.
The impulse of the characters is one of bohemian repudiation of dreary bourgeois timidity. But they are also motivated by the drive for mastery and control. As the narrator ponders, "the human will to control is as much about asserting power over your own body as exercising it over others". But asserting control over one's own body often purchases mental power at the cost of physical danger. Sontag elaborates in her essay on the affinity between sado-masochistic culture and fascist iconography. The thematic concern in Breath with "extraordinary" surfing (Pikelet scorns the term 'extreme sports') segues into a much darker form of ecstatic self-mastery: that of auto-asphyxiation for the purposes of sexual pleasure.
The theme is foreshadowed throughout. The novel starts with the middle-aged Pikelet as a paramedic arriving at the scene where a young man has hanged himself. But, unlike his younger colleague, Pikelet knows instantly that this is no suicide. The experience is the occasion for his recollections of youth that make up the rest of the novel. The motif of breathing in various formations and deformations is pervasive throughout. The sea itself is like the ebb and flow of respiration, "The way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing in air". But if the sea is like a respiring body, the allure of the surf is also a "rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath" and a stand against the "endless capitulation to biological routine". Pikelet's father disturbs his son through his loud snoring and apnoea. When they first meet, Pikelet and Loonie train themselves to hold their breath under water in the river in order to frighten onlookers. The boys at Loonie's school play games involving hyperventilation and making each other faint. The arrest of breathing becomes at once the risk to life but also how life is made more conscious and more aware: "It's funny, but you never really think about breathing. Until it's all you ever think about".
These urges to rout the routine, to grasp life two-handed, is well-suited to early adolescence, when the wax of selfhood is still pliable, and still yielding to untried impression and first experience. The two boys hunt adventure with a sort of desperation, hungry for the exhilaration of fear, the vitality of excess and extremity. The sensitivities and vulnerabilities of adolescence are depicted here with deft and painful accuracy. A tragic key in the novel, narrated as it is from the perspective of middle-age, is the loss of this youthful freshness. The middle-aged Pikelet, remembering his first encounter with surfing, knows the experience can never be reproduced. So it has become the ideal: "I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living".
The quiet delicacy and dignity of the narrative voice reflects another of its dominant themes: the silence that often prevails in male friendship. "We were mates but there were places where conversation simply couldn't go." In this very male world of physical prowess and courage, talking or self-revelation is dubiously effeminate. That credo also influences the middle-aged Pikelet who does not talk much to his paramedical colleagues and is therefore regarded as arrogant and aloof. "I've bored people in bars and lost a marriage to silence". Though the memoir itself would appear to contradict his claims of reticence and self-concealment, there is another sense in which the narrative voice reproduces a certain stoic quality of Pikelet. Its lyricism is exquisite but never effete or affected.
While Breath treats elemental and universal themes - the clash of
wilderness and civilization, self and society, youth and age - it does
not strain for epic effect. The voice has a muted, even modest quality,
betokening the half-successful life that Pikelet goes on to live. There
is struggle, disappointment and survival, but no portentous tragic
fall. It is a quiet, feather-fingered style that nonetheless has the
power to claw. For all the ostensible hubris of the theme, Winton's
characters are too scarred and thwarted for heroism, too typical to be
archetypal. Pikelet comes to realise that he is, in fact, ordinary but,
as he suggests to Sando late in the novel, "Maybe ordinary's not so
bad".
"The impulse of the characters is one of bohemian repudiation of dreary bourgeois timidity"...?
And there's me thinking they'd just gone for a surf...
I look forward to my next session of repudiating dreary bourgeois timidity - in a very bohemian way, of course.
Posted by: Alf Alderson | May 29, 2008 9:14:26 AM
Allegedly Winton's a bit of a bugger. My mate Cooty reckons he caught the antipodean laureate swapping his gash boat ladder with Cooty's own state of the art climber in a boatyard here in Fremantle. Sounds like Tim's trying to repudiate dreary bourgeoise timidity!
Posted by: Mark Dove | May 29, 2008 12:13:02 PM
Relax, Alex; despite the overblown reviews "Breath" isn't the long-awaited definitive surf novel.
The surfing element is fairly authentic, if unlikely at times, but that's grafted onto a darker theme which won't be to everyone's taste.
Bearing in mind the tragedy involving Shaun Tomson's son two years ago, am I alone in wondering when Winton came up with the idea for this book?
Posted by: Neil Watson | May 29, 2008 1:44:27 PM
Those who contend that surfing is about 'doing' are missing the point. Or proving Ronan McDonald's.
RJ
Posted by: Robert Jones | May 31, 2008 4:10:22 AM