Five - Am/Am not

The challenges in Breath become greater and greater for Pikelet and his mate Loonie after the initial simple thrill of learning how to surf a wave. Their mentor Sando takes them further out towards the extremes of surfing, where the waves rise higher out of deeper wilder seas, further into fear. Once Pikelet finds his limit and Loonie finds he doesn’t have one, the two friends begin to move apart; Loonie gravitating to Sando and Pikelet towards Sando’s wife Eva, and then into loneliness and despair.

There are a couple of words that have power in this book. Ordinary is one of them. Ordinary represents a life lived as far away as possible from threat, fear and death. For Pikelet it is the worst thing you can be. In Sawyer, his home town, “the locals in the street looked cowed, and weak and ordinary,” (p.116), “they liked to be ordinary. They were uncomfortable with ambition and avoided any kind of unpredictability or risk.” (p.136) The way to break with the ordinary is through another word in the book that has resonance: fear. One of the attractions of someone like Sando to someone like Pikelet is that he isn’t settled, he acts as if “he hadn’t finished with himself,” (p.66) he pushes himself to find the limit of his fear. Sando describes the feeling when you find yourself at this limit: “[it’s] like you’ve exploded and all the pieces of you are reassembling themselves. You’re new. Shimmering. Alive.” (p.111)

The problem is that to find this feeling requires you to go to further and further extremes, going further and further out to find fear again, and this can become dangerous and destructive. Sando’s wife Eva: “Once you’ve had a taste of something different, something kind of out there, then it’s hard to give up. Gets its hooks in you. Afterwards nothing else can make you feel the same.” (p.133) In the end Pikelet is so shattered by these experiences that it takes him a few decades to recover: “bit by bit I congregated, I suppose you could say, and then somehow cohered.” (p.211) Other people in the book don’t. Eventually they push so hard at fear, and finding the edge, that they die. They get found by staff in hotel rooms with a belt around their necks. They lose balance on the edge between being and not being, breathing and not breathing, and tumble into death.

Towards the end of the book Pikelet learns something about death and fear. He learns that they are sitting right there in the middle of the ordinary: that death can burst in upon your ordinary life; and that fear flits around the bedrooms and living rooms of suburbia in the gnawing thought: is this it? Is this what life holds for me?