Review: Breath by Tim Winton

I cannot quite remember why I didn't buy or read a copy of Breath when it was released in 2008, despite the fact that I've been a Tim Winton fan since the late 90s, wrote a part of my honour thesis on Dirt Music, though I can recall that 2008 was a year of many great changes for me, so maybe it just slipped off my radar. I wouldn't read another Winton novel until Eyrie was released in 2013. (Speaking of, I never did review Eyrie on the blog ...) Anyway, I bought a paperback copy a few years back, and put it down after a few pages. Having just enjoyed That Eye, The Sky and knowing that Winton has another novel due out soon, I decided to give this book another go.

What I got was a slow moving but enjoyable coming-of-age novel that is spoiled somewhat by a depraved plot twist somewhere toward the end. And maybe my stupidity is showing right here, but I honestly think this coming-of-age story could have worked just as well, if not better, without it. Okay, I get that it actively demonstrates the link between fear and adrenaline, which is what drives the characters through their adventures as they take greater and greater risks in the surf, but it also pushes the boundaries of what I am comfortable with reading about, and what I am not. Over the years, Winton has taken me to so many different places and forced me to feel empathy for so many different people, but this twist left me with a huge question mark over my head. Either it is a really shitty thing to do to a reader, or I am not nearly as smart or as literate as I previously thought.

Anyway, most of the novel tells the story of Bruce Pike, a kid growing up in Western Australia in the 1970s who, along with his friend Loonie, is befriended by Sando, a semi-retired pro surfer who wants to mentor both boys. As the years go on, Bruce, or Pikelet as he becomes known, slowly begins to realise that although he is good at his sport, he'll never be quite as good as the other two, or willing to take the risks that Sando and Loonie do. This, along with a betrayal, leads the fifteen year old Pikelet to have an affair with Eva, Sando's bitter wife, and then, well, something happens that proves that this child is well out of his depth. Or that he's you know, a fish out of water. (Sorry.) 

And, of course, Pikelet doesn't grow up to have a great life--it's as if the pain of living, and consequently, breathing is more painful than dying. It's a depressing thought.

Fans of Winton's early novels may be amused to know that Queenie Cookson makes an appearance as Pikelet's girlfriend. 

The writing is good, the last part of the book unsettling.

This book was read as part of the Aussie Author Challenge 2018

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more