JULES OLDER ENTHUSES OVER TIM WINTON'S LATEST NOVEL

jules rules
Breath
It’s probably the best surfing novel ever written.

The first question is, What's a surfing novel doing on skipressworld.com?
Answer: This one includes skiing.

The book is BREATH. That’s it, just one perfectly chosen word: BREATH.
Second question: How come you've never heard of it?
Answer: The author is seriously under-known in North America. A surfer-writer of astonishing skill, the reason you don't know Tim Winton is he’s from Western Australia, and he rarely leaves home.

The first Winton book I read was DIRT MUSIC. I couldn't put it down, and I couldn't stop talking about it. Not articulately talking; just repeating one phrase over and over: “This f%*#er can write!”
It wasn't a fluke. I muttered the same phrase all through BREATH.

OK, it’s a surfing and becoming-a-man tale told through the mouth of Bruce Pike, a kid growing up in a hardscrabble fishing town. He comes from the most ordinary of families, and he might have grown into the most ordinary of men, but for four things. First, meeting his fearless age-mate, Ivan Loony, a.k.a. Loonie. Next, discovering with Loonie the powerful draw of sea and surf. Third, becoming acolyte to a reclusive, big-wave surf-legend, Sando. And finally, falling in the thrall of Sando’s American wife, Eva.

Eva is the ski connection. She's a former freestyler, one of the first of the swaggering, thrill-needing, out-of-bounds, big-mountain outlaws. “She’d lived at the radical margin of her own sport. There was a warrior spirit in her, an implacable need to win the day…She loved snow the way I loved water — so much it hurt.”

Oh, it hurt, all right. She’d shattered her knee, and a series of botched operations combined with recklessly premature comeback attempt left her with a permanent limp and a constant companion named pain. Here's how Pike describes the comeback:
“When you're fifty feet in the air your only armour is conviction. Regardless of how hard you've trained, the moment your self-belief wavers, you are in danger. And because she was anxious she hurried slightly. That’s all it took — rushing the manoeuvre — and she nearly got away with it. But the landing was heavy and unbalanced, so that one leg took the bulk of the impact — wrong angle, wrong leg — and the knee collapsed. She cannoned, wailing, into the crowd. She hadn't skied since.”

So. This surfer-writer from country so flat and hot, there isn't even a baby ski hill for thousands of miles — how in hell does he understand skiing so well? He knows freestyle, he knows snow, he knows aerials, and he sure as hell knows pain. And whether the water comes in frozen crystals or towering waves, he knows the torments of growing up yearning, feeling different and longing for greatness.

Here's young Bruce Pike on young Bruce Pike:
“Could I do something gnarly, or was I just ordinary? We didn’t know it yet, but we’d already imagined ourselves into a different life, another society, a state for which no raw boy has either words or experience to describe. Our minds had already gone out to meet it and we’d left the ordinary in our wake.”
There's nothing ordinary about BREATH. Find it if you can.
— Jules Older

Footnote

In the US Breath is published by Farrar Strauss & Giroux while in In Aust. & NZ the publisher is Penguin and in the UK the publisher is Picador.