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Friday 5 December 2008

Breath

Ruling the waves

Philip Hensher reviews Tim Winton's latest novel

The great novel, I think, is Cloudstreet, a stunning, rumbustious epic of two unruly families sharing a huge, ramshackle house from the 1940s onwards. It has all of Winton’s virtues; a swift, demotic freshness of manner, the best ear for dialogue in contemporary fiction, and a powerfully driving narrative full of outbreaks of violence and passion. It springs, again, from a watery episode; at the outset the young Fish Lamb is brain-damaged after nearly drowning. In Faulknerian fashion, his damaged consciousness turns out to be at the centre of the novel. It’s an ingenious piece of structural engineering, as are many of the books, but Winton never seems to be primarily an aesthete; his best works are untidy, direct, full of life which spills over the intricate patterning.

Breath returns to the subject matter of his first novels, such as That Eye, The Sky, shedding the mannered present tense and rendering the conventional adolescent narrator with much more truthfulness. (Those early books, enjoyable as they are, look by the side of this like novels in a definite tradition, occupying an identifiable literary style). Breath seems to cut through everything, and to speak with unusual honesty.

Two boys, Pikelet, who tells the story, and his mate Loonie, are growing up in a small seaside town in Australia in the 1970s. There is not much to do except to scare the girls by diving into the river and holding your breath until they think you’ve drowned. On the brink of adolescence, they discover the sea, and surfing. At first they are scorned by the local surfers, doing their best with a pair of cheap, unsteerable polystyrene boards. But then they get more serious, and more daring; and they meet a mid-thirties professional called Sando.

The escalation of the surfer’s ambition is beautifully done, as the two boys and their heroic mentor move away into shark-infested deeps, the open ocean and 30-foot waves. Winton’s virtuosity is to move seamlessly from Pikelet’s honest speech into an elevated but absolutely direct account of what it is like to fling yourself at these great waves:

In a moment the wave was upon me, its mass overtaking me so fast that it felt as though I was travelling backwards. 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.

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