Book Review: 'Breath' by Tim Winton

“Breathless” might be a more appropriate title for this very different coming-of-age tale. It’s different not because it deals with growing up in a unique way, but because it’s about much more than young boys becoming young men. One persistent theme that permeates the narrative is danger. All the main characters court it, constantly pushing themselves perilously close to the limit.

The story is set mostly around Angelus, a seaside town in Western Australia. The main character, the book’s narrator, is thirteen-year-old Bruce Pike, known as Pikelet. His best friend is fourteen-year-old Loonie. They first meet at a popular swimming spot on the river, where Loonie is enacting a scene that’s a forewarning of things to come. When Pikelet arrives, there is panic. Loonie, who was swimming, has suddenly disappeared. The panicking day-trippers and tourists all fear he has drowned. In fact, he’s sitting on the riverbed, highly amused, holding his breath and clutching onto weeds. Though this prank is very small fry compared to what’s to come, it’s a foretaste of Loonie’s character and the direction of the story.

Surfing becomes the boys’ obsession. They’re only novices, but dream of taking on the biggest waves. When by chance they meet Sando, a bearded aging hippy of 36 who happens to be a world-class surfer, their dreams come closer to fulfilment. The older guy becomes the guru they hero-worship. He dares them to tackle bigger and more dangerous waves in remote and treacherous seas further off the coast. Loonie not only accepts every one of these challenges, but he is impatient for the next even bigger one. On the other hand, Pikelet lacks the motivation to push himself to the brink. More often, he stays behind, brooding on the beach, catching glimpses of his friends skimming the distant surf.

He envies their bravery, but resents their camaraderie even more. Deep down Pikelet knows he could never be the crazy risk taker; he’s too timid and rational and, maybe, he just lacks the guts. Yet, he is willing to take a different kind of risk. As one year blends into the next, nearing Pikelet’s fifteenth birthday, Loonie and Sando take off on a trip to South East Asia, chasing bigger waves and bigger highs. Abandoned, Pikelet develops a risky relationship with another person also left behind and brooding on the sidelines: Sando’s moody, ill-tempered American wife. She was once a famous snowboarder, but a serious knee-injury prevents her from pursuing that sport ever again. Without giving the story away, she too has a hankering for life on the edge. The edge in this case is Pikelet who, like most boys of fifteen, doesn’t need a whole lot of encouragement for what she has in mind.

Though most of the story takes place during Pikelet’s teenage years, the book begins with him as a middle-aged paramedic arriving by ambulance at the scene of a tragic death. The circumstances of that death are a prelude to what’s to come in rest of the book.

A very real and plausible account of growing up, Breath highlights the ubiquitous forces that influence every teenager’s development. People are fundamentally different; though they may share the same environment, it has little impact on how they turn out. Yet, their experiences as adolescents mark them for life. This is the central message of a book that could well be autobiographical, since it takes place in Western Australia in the 1970s, where Tim Winton and Pikelet were both in their early teens.

The book is available for the Kindle e-reader users in so-called AZW format. According to the article “An Introduction to Popular E-book File Formats”, with its own Digital Rights Management structure, AZW protects the e-book publishers and authors from possible piracy (Digital Book Readers). Kindle recognizes only this format, and other formats should be translated into AZW before they can be read through Kindle device.