Breath

Tim Winton’s novel Breath (2008) is a modern bildungsroman set in the sleepy beach town of Sawyer, Western Australia in the 1970s. There, protagonist Bruce “Pikelet” Pike comes of age; especially important to this process is his complicated friendship with “Loonie,” and later an older couple that he meets through his adventures with Loonie.

When we meet Bruce Pike at the beginning of Breath, he is in his fifties, a paramedic, and divorced. His lifelong penchant for thrill-seeking – which he details over the course of the ensuing story – has been channeled into his career. Called to the home of a boy who has apparently died of suicide, the event triggers something in Bruce. He has a dream about saving himself from drowning. Afterward, he seeks solace in playing his didjeridoo (a traditional Australian instrument), recalling his childhood in Sawyer.

The child of elderly, conservative parents, Pikelet, as he was known then, always felt estranged from other kids his age. The one talent Pikelet has is the ability to swim well. When Pikelet is eleven, he meets twelve-year-old Ivan “Loonie” Loon, who also loves the water – although not as much as he loves adrenaline. His favorite game is to hold his breath underwater to trick people into thinking he has drowned. After being challenged to a dare, Pikelet shows that he can hold his breath for a long time, too. Bonded by their similar appetites for danger, the boys become fast friends.



One day, the boys ride their bikes to the ocean – a place Pikelet had been forbidden to go by his father – and watch the surfers. They are entranced by the grace, and fearlessness, of the men “dancing on the sea.” One of the surfers, in particular, stands out for his skill. Charismatic, he is older than the others. Bill “Sando” Sanderson soon takes the boys under his wing. He allows them to store the secondhand surfboards they had worked hard to buy at his house. Spending a lot of time with the boys, he teaches them how to surf – engendering jealousy between them, as they each vie for his approval.

Sando's unusually close relationship with two boys less than half his age also creates jealousy in his younger American wife, Eva. The boys note that Eva seems quite moody, but don't take especial notice of her at first. For her part, Eva seems barely to tolerate the boys. As time wears on, Sando encourages the boys to attempt increasingly dangerous stunts. Loonie enjoys this, as it appeals to his nature; but the naturally more cautious Pikelet finds himself feeling sick over the constant boundary-pushing and one-upmanship. When Sando abruptly departs on a surfing holiday to Bali, Loonie in tow, without even telling Pikelet, it is undeniable to Pikelet that the dynamics of their triad have shifted for good; and not in his favor.

Left behind in Australia, and inwardly fuming over Sando's preference for Loonie, Pikelet redirects his adolescent obsession and need for validation toward Eva. Eva is twenty-five, and Pikelet, at this time, is fifteen. Bonding over their shared feelings of being scorned by Sando, their relationship turns sexual. An adolescent boy, Pikelet is at first excited by this; but the excitement soon wears thin. Eva likes to be choked and has a history of autoerotic asphyxiation. Her sexual needs eventually repulse Pikelet. As Pikelet becomes disillusioned with Eva, he also starts to see his relationships to Loonie and Sando in a different light. One day, for instance, after Sando has returned to Australia, Pikelet sees him strutting about in a speedo that he thinks is inappropriate for a man his age; he begins to see in Sando's behavior a “creepiness” he had never noticed before.



Much later, Pike, fully grown, stumbles across a laudatory magazine article about Sando, who has gone into the snowboarding business. He learns that Eva committed suicide and that Loonie, adrenaline junkie to the end, died in an apparent drug deal in Mexico. Pike reflects on his life, and how his adolescent experiences with Loonie, Sando, and Eva indelibly influenced it. He attributes to the trauma he experienced during that period the later dissolution of his marriage and a stay in a mental health ward. Despite these negative ramifications, Bruce goes on to have two beloved and healthy daughters and continues to surf, although not in the extreme way he had with Sando.

Breath can be read as an extended meditation on the pitfalls of thrill-seeking. For Winton, these all literally involve breath: from Loonie's early practical jokes to Sando's death-defying rides over the crashing waves to Eva's sexual fetishes. And as Pike muses toward the end of the novel: “More than once... 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.” By making an automatic biological function the primary motif of a novel about a physically and emotionally devastating coming-of-age, Winton suggests the importance of trauma generally to the development of identity.