There is so much in Breath, for such a simple read. Coming of age, boy to man, hunting for danger, what is a man, surfing/water/ocean, breathing. And not breathing.
You wouldn’t think that a 40-something, non-surfing, safety-seeking woman would be able to become so absorbed in this novel, but I did.
Actually, I think it was more like me absorbing the novel, rather than the other way around.
To say I loved the book doesn’t really describe it. I hated the beginning. I hated the similar experience near the end. But the novel enveloped me and swept me along, in a way that I imagine a surf swell will.
Which, I think, is a sign of Winton‘s brilliant technique.
Describing surfing as a religious experience perhaps most potently captured the deliriously zealous gleam in friends eyes when they talk about surfing:
When you make it, when you’re still alive and standin at the end, you get this tingly-electric rush. You feel alive, completely awake and in your body. Man, it’s like you’ve felt the hand of God. The rest of it’s just sport’n recreation, mate. Give me the hand of God any day.
This idea of surfing making you feel completely “alive” and “awake” is played with in the bigger scheme of life-giving breath throughout the novel, and how growing from boy to man seems to involve a life-and-death struggle for excitement and worth:
More than once since then I’ve wondered whether the life-threatening high jinks that Loonie and I and Sando and Eva got up to in the years of my adolescence were anything more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath.
But it’s not just adolescent boys that live on the knife-edge of animation. Baby girls and old men struggle with breath – with the normalization and automation of life, with the monotony of breathing – just as Pikelet and Loonie’s diving games were “a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath”:
When playing the didgeridoo,
the wind comes through me in circles, like a memory, one breath, without pause, hot and long. It’s funny, but you never really think much about breathing. Until it’s all you ever think about. I consider the startled look on the faces of my girls in the moments after each of them was born and suctioned and forced to draw air for the first time. .. Yet within a moment or two the whole procedure is normalized, automatic.
Long before I even turned in I’d hear [my father] begin to snore, but it was later, in the quiet of the night, when he really got going. … The noise wasn’t the worst of it. It was the pauses that really got to me. When he fell silent I’d lie there waiting, forced to listen to my own breathing which was so steady and involuntary.
I’m just sorry that it ended as though he was running out of time, or pages. He’d spent so long through most of the book savouring the tale he was telling, giving us sumptuous details of what happened, tasting them. Andtheninarushdecadesandimportanteventshappenedanditwasfinished.
Perhaps this represented the rush to the surface as you’re running out of air …