Books & Poetry

To its devotees, surfing may be as essential as breathing but to many in our damp riverside city, it’s about as exciting a topic. Nevertheless, as the Australian writer Tim Winton well knows, any place that the life force gathers has story potential. That includes the ramshackle house where Winton set his best known novel, ‘Cloudstreet’, or the wave-bashed crannies of the Western Australian coast that call to Bruce Pike – Pikelet – and his friend Loonie in this book. It probably includes the human lungs, and in a sense this is a story about them, too.

The boys are pre-teen amateur surfers when they meet Sando and his grumpy, lame wife Eva; Sando, reckless and self-centred, becomes their guru, urging them on to bigger waves and scarier reefs. Pikelet shows fear but Loonie lives up to his name and soon a lonely, abandoned Pikelet is mooching up to the house where he finds Eva, who reflects and magnifies his feelings to a terrifying degree. Terrifying, because Eva has issues of her own, and they’re scary enough to batter a teenage boy against emotional reefs that will leave him scarred and shaking for life.

The boy overwhelmed by adults who ought to know better is an old story, but Winton has a bigger topic: the unease that dependence brings. He starts from the basics – we must have oxygen, therefore there is an enticing wildness to depriving ourselves of it: why else do boys compete to hold their breath underwater? – and moves upwards and outwards. And downwards and further down…

Pikelet, whom we first meet as a damaged adult, Loonie, Sando and Eva all surf off the page. And Winton’s rural ’70s Australia, with its curving coastline and thin-lipped men (‘how strange it was,’ says Pikelet of surfing, ‘to see men do something beautiful’) is also present. It’s a lovely, sad book, filled with fantastic descriptions – and with a strong sense of the undercurrents in a giant country that sometimes seems to have too much air, yet whose inhabitants frequently suffocate for want of a culture of communication.