Breath

Tim Winton

4 ideas

1. Pikelet, Loonie, Sando and the Nautilus

   In 1970s Sawyer, Western Australia, timid Bruce 'Pikelet' Pike and reckless Loonie hold breath-holding contests in the river, then fall under Sando, a former surf champion who trains them to ride ever-bigger breaks, from Old Smoky to the Nautilus, a remote offshore bombora. Sando favours Loonie and leaves Pikelet behind when the two travel abroad. Pikelet begins an affair with Sando's embittered wife Eva, a former freestyle skier, who draws him into erotic asphyxiation. Decades later Pikelet, now a paramedic, recognises the same practice in a dead teenager his parents believe took his own life.

2. Thrill thresholds ratchet and never reset

   Each successful brush with danger becomes the new baseline, so the next hit requires a bigger wave, a longer breath-hold or a tighter ligature. The same craving for intensity migrates between arenas, from surfing to sex to drugs, because what is addictive is the heightened state, not the activity.

3. The mentor who feeds on protégés

   He frames this as initiation into a superior way of living, and his contempt for 'ordinary' people works as the recruiting pitch. He pushes the boys to their limits for his own vicarious satisfaction, and he drops them when they stop being useful. The protégé mistakes being used for being chosen.

4. The ordinary as the real achievement

   Seen from the aftermath, the cult of the extraordinary turns out to be a flight from life rather than an intensification of it. It produces the dead, the broken and the chronically numb. The adult narrator's hard-won capacity for pointless, beautiful acts done without an audience is recast as the real feat of courage. So are ordinary work, such as reviving strangers as a paramedic, and simply continuing to breathe.

Save and mark ideas in the app