Cards on the table: Tim Winton’s Breath is the foremost contender for novel of the year so far. Mind you, 47-year-old Winton, a native of the small town of Albany, Australia, has never wanted for readers or champions; his earliest books An Open Swimmer and Shallows, written while still in college, won him prizes in his native country, and he’s been twice shortlisted for the Booker (The Riders in 1995, and Dirt Music seven years later). He’s published novels, short story collections, children’s books and non-fiction works; all still in print, many of which draw on a vivid sense of place (mainly coastal Australia) for inspiration. Unsurprisingly, Winton is also renowned for his public role as an environmentalist.
Breath, his ninth full-length novel, is a small book bulging with big, perennial themes. A coming of age tale set in Australia, it’s a surfing fable, a dissection of teenage friendship, hero worship and sexual inauguration at the hands of an older woman. It also contains finely drawn characters, virtuoso writing, and, most importantly, a subtle but moving story.
“It can sometimes be a bit of a struggle if you are passionate about story and you like to write about things where something happens,” says Winton, a rangy, ponytailed figure who seems a tad constrained by the Dublin hotel conference room he’s been corralled in for the day.
“The legacy of modernism,” he continues, “is that the more serious you are, the less will happen in the book. There’ll be waves of energy, in that sort of Wolfian, Joycean sense, but essentially the less that happens, the better off we’d all be, that’s the understanding. And what turned me onto reading as a kid was momentum, the fact that something was going to happen, Robert Louis Stephenson and Mark Twain. It was exciting, and story was really important. You get that from Tolstoy and Dickens.
“But somehow it’s as though two world wars was enough to disqualify story forever. Everything had to be this endless pristine interiority. And that’s okay, but if you’ve had a certain kind of a life where you live in a vivid natural environment, then you want to write about that and not feel like you’ve got to apologise for the fact that you’re not essentially writing for some pure, aesthetic, endlessly embellished series of rhetorical questions.”
If anything, Breath frequently evokes Steinbeck’s trinity of tenets: place, personality and event.
“There’s poor old Steinbeck, they could never forgive him for having voluntary readers,” Winton chuckles. “He was an uneven writer, no doubt, but you felt something. When he was good, you felt hurt by it, you felt murdered, and you remembered it.”
That’s precisely what the reader feels after finishing Of Mice And Men: wounded, raw.
“Yeah, you gotta savour that. That’s what I told myself as a younger person: I want to write stuff that will mean something to somebody, rather than something people would admire in an intellectual way only. If you haven’t taken some paint off them, then you’ve wasted your time.”
Certainly, the problem with self-styled nihilistic or ‘transgressive’ writers – Dennis Cooper, Chuck Palahniuk, Amis or Ellis at their worst – is that because their characters leave us cold, we don’t care what happens to them, therefore the writer has failed in his intention to mark the reader.
“It’s funny, on the way from the airport I was talking about that very thing, just thinking, isn’t it interesting how a generation of writers has reached its zenith and peaked and gone, and yet, such talent, such privilege, such education, such literary power, all standing for so little, being of so little account. All that talent in search of a purpose. They’ve almost become neutered by irony. It’s a shame, because two generations before them were these people in much more straitened circumstances, with less money, less class mobility, sometimes less talent, who wrote books that mattered more.”
One immediately thinks of George Orwell.
“Oh absolutely, of course. And even those kind of working class writers of the ’50s, Stan Barstow and those guys, they had much less going for them. And this is not a proletarian class pitch or anything, but those writers would have spoken to people, and for people, and were treasured in a way that made them special, in the same way that Orwell did. And I just think for some of those other kind of safe, lazy, talented nihilists that you’re referring to… I wonder who they speak to, I wonder who they matter to except for maybe half a dozen literary editors and a few people they have lunch with.
“I mean, I have no argument with ’em, and good luck to each of them, man, boy and woman – and most of them are boys operating as men – but that kind of stuff wasn’t what drew me to reading as a young person, wasn’t the sort of stuff that fed me. It might have been the stuff that attracted me as a student because you were having to step up to a sort of social plate, but you get over that.
“There’s a great quote from Auden, I’m paraphrasing, but it’s something like, ‘In the full knowledge that writing in itself is essentially not that important, anyone who goes ahead and devotes their life to it, it’s a signal of true character!’ (Laughs). He’s being flippant about it, but he can only say that because he knows it’s important. I think art – and story is part of that – is not a luxury. It’s shaping chaos, even if it’s an artifice, it’s still a shape, that’s how you get through the day. It’s food and shelter and sex. It’s elemental. We’re hard wired for it. And to separate art from inside the cave where the fire is going, to take it outside and make it some other species of activity, some frippery on the side, you do damage to yourself.”
Breath/’s most transcendental sections evoke the mystical art of surfing in tandem with the terrifying majesty of the sea itself. In these passages, where Winton revels in the natural mythic, he comes within spitting distance of a Moby Dick or The Old Man And The Sea.
“That’s a pretty intimidating rap!” he laughs. “I might have to take it with a grain of salt, and try not to be frightened by it, but thank you. Part of the naughty fun for me was writing a literary book that had surfing in it. I mean, it’s not supposed to be a subject matter fit and worthy of a literary novel. In Australia everyone feels a bit burdened by the fact that you’re seen as this hedonistic beach culture, everyone wants to be perceived as a bit more cosmopolitan and sophisticated, yadda-yadda, and I felt that there’d be a kind of resistance to something written about surfing, so I got some sort of perverse pleasure out of seeing if I could do something with it, not really knowing where it would go. It’s curious to get the kinds of responses it’s got. It’s also weird that within days of publication it’s the biggest selling book in Australia. A literary novel about surfing – figure that out! It’s doing everyone’s head in, including mine. But I don’t mind, I can live with that!”
Breath also graphically evokes the totality and intensity of being 15 years old, the adolescent experience as an analogue for everything you’ll feel again.
“Yeah, you do feel as a young person that you’ve been peeled, that you don’t have any skin,” Winton considers. “Every little thing touches you, you feel things so vividly. I always love Robert Duvall in that film Tender Mercies, he’s playing a country singer and an alcoholic, he’s obviously got some turmoil in his past. And the woman he’s with says, ‘Tell me what’s the problem?’ And he says, ‘Woman, I cayn’t.’ And she keeps pressing him, and he says, ‘Goddam woman, can’t you understand: I cayn’t.’ He has these huge emotions and this back story and he just can’t express it, and in a way that speaks for the 15-year-old. This huge turmoil of emotions, aspirations, yearning, bewilderment.
“And the link between being 15 and 50 is I think that feeling doesn’t just happen once in your life. In middle age that sense of being naked and confused and bewildered and outpaced and misunderstood and self-conscious, it all comes around again. I think that often takes people by surprise. It’s often trivialised when people talk about mid life crisis as though everybody in the world as a male goes out and buys a sports car and humps the secretary or whatever, but most people just feel disoriented and awkward and inadequate in the same way you did at 15 when you were convinced that you weren’t cool, when coolness was just a bridge too far.”
Without giving the end away, one of the awful, unpalatable truths offered by Winton’s book is that sometimes people peak early, and the second and third acts of such lives are a struggle to accept that they’ve already lived out the most dramatic and eventful period of their history. It’s pretty tragic stuff.
“Yeah, especially in an era when you’re supposed to be endlessly evolving upwards, endlessly improving, endlessly actualising,” he observes. “I know some retired sports people who were rock stars in their day, rich, famous, the elite of the elite of the elite, and your life’s over at 31. You get the X-ray and it’s goodnight nurse, you’ve got to live the rest of your life being famous for something you did in your 20s. So I guess I’ve seen that up close, and in retrospect I wonder if that influenced me in the writing, that bruised sensibility that this guy is telling the story with, the sadness. He says that he’s okay, he’s sort of managing, he’s hanging together, but he’s not exactly flourishing.
“It’s quite taxing to live like that, but in a sense that’s pretty much the story of leaving childhood behind. We’re all forced (out of) the bliss of unselfconsciousness, the Eden we all grow up in of not knowing and not having to care. You live in a world without consequence when you’re a child, and you’re expelled from paradise into awareness as soon as you’ve got to take responsibility.
“And also, you’re at the mercy of the actions of other people, many of whom you’ll never meet. In the same way that you’ve got to cope with waves from storms across the horizon in places that you don’t even know, you’re subject to the tsunami of other people’s actions. And that’s part of the frustrating realisation of adulthood. You think, ‘Man, it’s bad enough that I’ve got to live with the consequences of my own actions, but I’ve also got to wear the actions, of, it doesn’t matter if it’s George Bush or if it’s the moronic homicidal idiots who are running Burma, everyone is out there swimming in the same brine, and we’re all subject to the consequences of each other.’ And the miracle of life is that it isn’t worse! (Laughs) Because it should be!”

Breath is published by Picador