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Friday 5 December 2008

Breath

Ruling the waves

Philip Hensher reviews Tim Winton's latest novel

‘It was our coliseum,’ Pikelet remarks, and the real subject here is fear, and masculinity, and daring. In the end, Sando and Loonie leave Pikelet behind. They repeat like a mantra that everyone is always afraid, that only the mad are not afraid, but Pikelet, in the end, makes the judgment that he can’t get into the water, and it ends their friendship. Beneath all this is what amounts to the three of them eyeing up each other’s manliness, and the whole narrative is driven by a thinly disguised homoerotic tension. Both Pikelet and Loonie compete for the older man’s favours; neither of them quite know what to do with them, once they are bestowed.

In the end, Sando’s wife Eva, a grumpy, unpredictable presence hardly taken seriously by the boys, intrudes. In one of Winton’s subtlest touches, the beachfront, Castaneda-reading, drop-out lifestyle Sando and Eva lead turns out to be funded by Eva’s trust-fund. As so often in Winton, the narrative turns out to be about unexpressed and insurmountable facts of social class — the two of them end up as pseudo-hippy CEOs of a snowboarding empire. But by then, Eva and Pikelet have a sordid and concealed sexual history, and the habits of breath-holding, which recur so meaningfully in the rest of the narrative, have taken on a sinister meaning.

It is beautifully and lucidly done. If the patterning of symbols and recurrent action ever threaten to become too neat, Winton’s gusto in rendering Australian speech — ‘No point bobbin around out here like a bloody teabag’ — quickly gives it the energy and excitement of observed life. Perhaps only at the end, when the action completes itself before an over-extended coda, does Winton’s formal skill fail him. But on the whole, in this story of surfing, he does what a great writer can do; to make us see, while sitting in our armchairs, exactly what it would be like to stand on a bit of hardboard while a 30-foot wave defeats our attempts to float on it. I don’t suppose I will ever do anything of the sort, but now I don’t have to in order to understand how it feels.

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