One day, they sneak out on their bikes on a forbidden trip to the ocean and see a surfer skilled above all others, sliding down the waves with "his head thrown back as if he'd just finished singing an anthem that nobody else could hear". Anything for a "rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath". The boys spur each other on to greater and greater risks, to the point of vomiting and passing out. They meet in the local river, Loonie swimming to the bottom and holding his breath for upwards of two minutes with the sole intention of scaring tourists into thinking he's drowning. A small town of "millers and loggers and dairy farmers", Sawyer is also home to Loonie, one year older than Pikelet and a boy congenitally incapable of turning down a dare. Twelve-year-old Bruce Pike, "Pikelet", lives in Sawyer, near Perth in Western Australia, in the early 70s. But there was a time, Winton tells us in his first novel since the Booker-shortlisted Dirt Music, when surfing was the closest a man - perhaps especially an Australian man - could get to poetry. "Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared." He is talking, surprisingly enough, about surfing, a multimillion-pound international sport that nowadays hardly anyone thinks of in terms of not being seen. "How strange it was to see men do something beautiful," says the young narrator of Breath.
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