I didn’t understand this behaviour. I had no special interest in electricity. Granted, it’s a potent, tangible presence in a world that’s cast off presences. It just just a moment of righteous sensation, like a blow to the head. It knocked me down. It hurt like hell. But it was something I could feel. (252)
Though this is a painful and sad story, and one that doesn’t really end happily - the damage is permanent - there’s a transcendent beauty that runs through it, as it does through all of Winton’s novels. It is partly just the utter beauty of the prose. Winton’s words turn a paddle into the ocean into an epiphany:
Like you’ve exploded and all the pieces of you are reassembling themselves. You’re new. Shimmering. Alive. (138)
Nearly every line in this novel is taut and wrought with tender nerve-ending sensation that it’s impossible not to feel along with the characters. The power of the novel isn’t only in the stormy waves that Pikelet risks his life on. It’s in the quiet musings that take place between the Didgeridoo and the Ambulance rides later: the fear, greater than any wave, that life is just an inhalation and exhalation of breath and nothing more. The breath motif is everywhere. There’s Eva’s breath in a plastic bag; Pikelet’s father’s Apnoea at night; the breath holding between Pikelet and Loonie that prefigures their surfing exploits; the exhalation of didgeridoo that narrates the story; and, above all, the breath that is, metaphorically and actually, life itself. In the end, the journey becomes the point, and despite the damage, the breathing and dancing continue, creating meaning and value that needs "no explanation". It’s worth reading (and re-reading) Breath solely for the magic of its linguistic beauty. Tim Winton has created a tremendously powerful story that will continue to linger in the mind of the reader long past the initial reading.
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