Tim Winton (2008) Breath

Anyone that has ever dived into my writing knows I can’t spell and often confuse breath and breathe. Breath is the stuff you breathe. The stuff of life. Bruce— ‘Pikelet’—Pike is the kind of paramedic that you’d want to turn up in an emergency. He misses nothing, the broken collar-bone of the father that has been fractured beating down the door of his boy’s room. The mother trying to concoct a story that it was an accident and her boy didn’t hang himself, wouldn’t do that kind of thing. Pikelet doesn’t judge. He’s empathetic. He knows what it’s like to have nowhere to turn to but death. What follows is how he came to have that wisdom, that kind of knowledge and insight. Breath is all backstory of Pikelet as a boy. Usually, at this point a review flings in a reference to ‘Catcher in the Rye’. Pikelet is not a phony. He inhabits the story in the same way he inhabits a mill town called Sawyer and the weatherboard house the oldies, his parents, live in. His father was afraid of the sea and for most of the other townies it was a backdrop to their lives. Pikelet says his ‘parents didn’t quite approve of Loonie’. Nobody approves of Loonie, not even Loonie. He’s a Huck Finn kind of boy. Wherever there’s trouble, at its epicentre finds Loonie. The pull of the sea is too much to resist. They find surfboards and a surfboarding god in Sando. The sea offered one-hundred different ways to kill yourself: the shark whose turf they trespassed on, to the rock and crags of Old Smokey and later Nautilus that created virgin waves and surf no board could survive in. Success brought a few flickering minutes or seconds when their bodies became fully alive to not only the danger, but to being alive, to breathing in the air that nobody has breathed before. Risk is addictive, but the fear of losing face, of not being special is a catalyst for Pikelet to grow up and become the type of person that knows there are no winners only survivors. His model for this is Sando’s wife, Eva, the one with the bad leg, the one the boys don’t like. He’s fifteen, she’s forever, but they have a fling. Nothing fits, but everything makes its own kind of sense. Tim Winton’s Breath makes you glad you’re alive. Remarkable.