So — pro or anti surfing in possibly lethal situations? Pro or anti teenage drug use? Pro or anti the outer reaches of sexual experimentation? Winton offers a sphinx-like stare, and his final position on all these issues remains a fascinating, but to the last undivulged, secret.
The novel’s style similarly occupies a position mid-way between extremes. It’s both literary and colloquial, lovingly evocative of gaudily colored Australian landscapes, but ever on the lookout for possible verbal indulgence, and often terse and clipped as a result.
Maybe all this is a result of Winton the writer being what his narrator is in his fiction — a middle-aged man describing the carefree indulgence of youth. Naturally the thrills of risk-taking courted by the two boys and their perennially youthful mentor are going to be viewed more skeptically at 45 than at 14. But also seeing many sides of any question, as Winton appears to do, has long been an admired characteristic of the novelist. A doctrinaire intransigence is something best left to proselytizing missionaries, and Winton is a very different kind of person.
The title, Breath, refers to many things — the two boys’ experiments in hyperventilation before diving into a river and holding on to a tree root until their lungs almost burst, and Eve’s preferred sexual technique, but also youth and life itself — a series of breaths between dark and dark which, if we’re lucky, we can do with what we please, except prolong them indefinitely.
This novel is in essence serious holiday reading. This may sound like a paradox, but the book itself is nothing less than paradoxical. There’s more to Winton than meets the eye, though possibly less than he would like you to think there is as well. He may court sensation, but he’s also a neat and efficient craftsman. These two qualities combine better at some times than at others, but either way they allow here for the production of an engaging exercise in the always problematic art of novel-writing.
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