apposition reviewed Breath by Tim Winton
None
5 stars
It seemed like a routine call. Bruce Pike, weird old paramedic, arrives at the scene of a hanging. But as he enters the room of the teenage victim, he begins to notice things. The door’s lock has been knocked off and the corpse freshly dressed, as if the boy’s parents were trying to cover something up. Several sets of faded ligature marks bruise his neck. This was no hanging, but an accident, the recognition of which takes us, together with Bruce, back through his unhappy childhood.
Bruce “Pikelet” Pike grew up in a small Australian logging town called Sawyer. Its people are ordinary and unremarkable, “rusted on” and “uncomfortable with ambition.” In such mundane surroundings, he is magnetically drawn to the only other kid willing to defy life, Ivan “Loonie” Loon, son of the town publican, a neglected, fearless, feral kid who is always up for a dare:
He …
It seemed like a routine call. Bruce Pike, weird old paramedic, arrives at the scene of a hanging. But as he enters the room of the teenage victim, he begins to notice things. The door’s lock has been knocked off and the corpse freshly dressed, as if the boy’s parents were trying to cover something up. Several sets of faded ligature marks bruise his neck. This was no hanging, but an accident, the recognition of which takes us, together with Bruce, back through his unhappy childhood.
Bruce “Pikelet” Pike grew up in a small Australian logging town called Sawyer. Its people are ordinary and unremarkable, “rusted on” and “uncomfortable with ambition.” In such mundane surroundings, he is magnetically drawn to the only other kid willing to defy life, Ivan “Loonie” Loon, son of the town publican, a neglected, fearless, feral kid who is always up for a dare:
He worked on you so long and so consistently that of rage and frustration you’d find yourself challenging him to do something you had no interest in him doing... his indignation spurred him on to be even more stupid and dangerous than he intended. (98)
For fun, Loonie rides his bicycle full-tilt at logging trucks until they are forced to slam on the emergency brakes and nearly tip over. At the edge of town, where the fat ladies and timid girls go for their Sunday walks, Loonie and Pikelet compete to hold their breaths at the bottom of the river. The game only ends when Loonie catapults out of the water to scare the worried onlookers.
During their expeditions out to the ocean, they fall in with a crew of surfers, particularly one on their periphery, Sando, a guru-like figure living in the bush with his grumpy wife Eva. As it turns out, Sando is a professional surfer who has won championships around the world. He takes the boys under his wing, teaching them not just how to ride waves, but instilling in them his ideal of the composed warrior-monk. He wants them to be extraordinary: to be capable of facing down fear and doing things the boring townsfolk of Sawyer could not even imagine.
The trio spend all summer surfing along the coast. Their highlight is the plotting and conquering of a break they call “Old Smoky”, a patch of reef where the waves reach 10 or 15 metres high. Bruce fondly recalls the moment he stood atop the water’s crest:
Together those rides wouldn’t add up to more than half a minute of experience, of which I can only recall a fraction: flickering moments, odd details. Like the staccato chat of water against the board. A momentary illusion of being at the same level as the distant cliffs. The angelic relief of gliding out onto the shoulder of the wave in a mist of spray and adrenaline. Surviving is the strongest memory I have; the sense of having walked on water. (118)
While the boys vie for the “distant glow” of Sando’s admiration, Eva is unimpressed that her husband is trying to look cool to a pair of scraggly teenagers. There is something unhappy about the couple. Eva, who has a bung leg, takes no pleasure in anything and spends most of her time loafing about the house. Sando seems indifferent to her condition. He leaves her to fend for herself when he goes on unannounced trips overseas.
After Old Smoky, the boys set their sights on an even bigger break, the Nautilus. The waves are so big there that even Sando is unsure if he wants to risk it. Loonie, afraid of nothing, spurs everyone on. Only Pikelet is unable to shake the fear rinsing his gut, and sits out on the day. The decision marks him out as unmanly and boring and ordinary—everything the trio desperately want not to be. It causes a shift in the friend group. Sando begins to favour Loonie, taking him along on a trip to Indonesia, and leaving Bruce behind to mope about with Eva.
Stuck back home, the two grow closer together, and begin an affair. As they grow physically close, Bruce discovers why Eva is so bitter and jaded. Like Sando, she was also once an extreme sportsman, a freestyle skier. A bad jump shattered her knee, leaving her unable to walk properly: “... the moments before she landed were her last happy ones... sky and snow the same colour, her skis a defiant cross against the milky blur.” (219)
Like Bruce, Eva was born into a life of relative comfort and terminal boredom. She sought to escape by constantly pushing and testing the threshold of what she could physically do:
I understood the contempt she felt for those who withdrew from the frey or settled for something modest or reasonable. It was this conviction, I saw in time, that lay at the heart of her battle with Sando, who’d taken another tack, a mystical path she now said was bullshit. She relished opposition, yet her only real opponents had been the fact of life: gravity, fear, and the limits of endurance. (210)
Whatever shelter they briefly take in each other, Bruce is still a teenage boy, and Eva quickly bores of him. To make things more interesting, she introduces a pink cellophane bag and shows Bruce how to use it to asphyxiate her during sex. Bruce carries out the act with enormous self-hatred. He loathes the “evil, crinkly sound of the bad”, the “smeary film of her breath inside it.” (233) Although he doesn’t want to, he is a boy obsessed with a girl, and just as when Loonie eggs him on to do something reckless, he can’t bring himself to resist.
One evening it goes too far and Eva passes out:
Before she began to shudder I thought of boys falling to the ground in swoons. Mottled faces. Blue-white lips. The stiffened limbs of the poleaxed. Like steers given the bolt in the killing yard. And I remembered the way all sound and light shrank to the fineness of copper wire. (226)
Breath is the unifying motif throughout the book. It is the source of life and the last gasp before death. When a child is born, they draw in air, sucking it down like a “gutful of fire” (49) before the breathing becomes automatic. Only in a moment of fear or panic does the feeling of needing air return. The conscious mind shuts off as the body reasserts its animal impulses to reclaim what had been formerly taken for granted.
Bruce and Loonie are unsatisfied with where the boundaries lay. They compete to hold their breath in the rivers around Sawyer, which prepares them for surfing, where the mastery of breath and the control of the will over mind and body enables them to do the near-miraculous: to walk on water, as Bruce describes it, with an elegance and skill and beauty unmatched by anything else.
Later, in Eva’s terrifying sex games, Bruce learns what is at stake when he loses control. As the oxygen fades and the experience of the “last sucking bubble of consciousness” intensifies, pleasure gives over to deadly pain. Eva would give everything away in the pursuit of the thrill, however diminished and numbed its feeling. From this moment on, Bruce is put on a dangerous path. He will continue chasing reckless sensation, and spend the rest of his life learning how to formulate a conscious "no" against it that he might survive.
The affair tapers off when Eva falls pregnant. Sando and Loonie come back not long after. Pikelet refuses to go surfing with them again, and the three drift apart. Only years later does he discover, in newspaper clippings or rumours from acquaintances, what unhappy fates and accidental deaths have befallen his friends.
He ends up a nutcase. Because of a night he had with Eva while she was pregnant, he develops a fetish for pregnant women. His future wife catches on to this from various odd remarks he makes, and leaves him. Bruce throws away all of the inhibitions which kept his impulses in check. He begins to experiment with electricity, shocking himself unconscious at work, for which he loses his job. For a time he lives on the margin of society, including with a defrocked priest in the outback.
Only as a paramedic does he end up redeeming himself. Finally, Bruce is able to “improve the odds, to make good.” (262) He knows what it takes to be like Sando or Loonie, to be a person capable of extraordinary things in the face of impossible circumstances. That is the same quality which enables him to stay lucid and sensible on call-outs, as on the night he discovered the truth about the boy’s suicide. He still has it in him to disregard the thought that tells him he can’t or shouldn’t do something. But he has also learnt that doubt tells him something valuable; that fear, like bravery, is an instinct to be mastered, and that listening to it does not make him a coward.
