Two - Beginning to Breathe

I wonder what the ordinary people are doing today?
- Breath

The main character in Breath by Tim Winton is nicknamed Pikelet. When the book starts its main story Pikelet is just at the beginning of secondary school growing up in a small town in Australia called Sawyer not far from the coast. Sawyer is not much of a town and Pikelet doesn’t think much of it, or the people in it. In a way it is like a backwater, a small pool at the spent end of an estuary: safe, flat and boring. What Pikelet comes to crave are the places just over the dunes where things are more unsettled: both the places and the people.

A lot of reviews say that this novel is not about surfing. I suppose they are right. I suppose it is a novel about that exciting time when you begin to find out what it is like to be alive, about breathing and not breathing and what can happen when you push at the edge between those two states. Surfing is the main way that this idea is explored so I still think it is ok to say that the book is about surfing.

I like not surfing. I like not swimming. My metaphors about the sea are to do with drowning, and murky depths, but Tim Winton’s surfing sounds bloody exciting:

I will always remember my first wave that morning. The smells of paraffin wax and brine and peppy scrub. The way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing in air. How the wave drew me forward and I sprang to my feet, skating with the wind of momentum in my ears. I leant across the wall of upstanding water and the board came with me as though it was part of my body and mind. The blur of spray. The billion shards of light…. Though I’ve lived to be an old man with my own share of joy and happiness for all the mess I’ve made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living. (pp.32-3)

When Pikelet first sees the boys out surfing his imagination is seized by this fact:

How strange it was to see men doing something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared. In Sawyer, a town of millers and loggers and dairy farmers… men did solid, practical things…. [T]here wasn’t much room for beauty in the lives of our men. (p.23)

So this is how the book begins: the exhilaration of being alive and the discovery of useless beauty. It reminded me of being Pikelet’s age. My early heroes were Prince, and A-ha and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. These are a specific kind of pop star. These are not AC/DC, Iron Maiden and ZZ Top, these were flamboyant performers, over dressed, over coifed, men who sang, and danced, and hung desperately onto microphones and said things like – love is like an energy, rushing in, rushing inside of me. So much useless beauty, and so different from Paraparaumu, and the men there, and the boys I shared classrooms with.