Muddied Waters RISK AND REFLECTION IN SIMON BAKER’S BREATH
The last sucking bubble of consciousness. The rising gorge of panic. Yes, a delicious ricochet of sparks.
I suppose I knew well enough what it felt like. It was intense, consuming, and it could be beautiful. That far out at the edge of things you get to a point where all that stands between you and oblivion is the roulette of body-memory, the last desperate jerks of your system trying to restart itself. You feel exalted, invincible, angelic because you’re totally fucking poisoned. Inside it’s great, feels brilliant. But on the outside it’s squalid beyond imagining.
The above excerpt, from Tim Winton’s 2008 novel Breath, describes the imagined sensations associated with erotic asphyxiation: the feeling of ‘respiratory acidosis’, whereby one’s blood turns acidic as one’s lungs cry out for air. That toxic transformation – both literal and metaphorical – is central to Winton’s award-winning novel, an Australian coming-of-age story whose characters frequently find themselves struggling for breath at the precipice of human endurance.
On the page, Breath probes the psychic bruises inflicted by an adolescence spent exploring the limits of human experience. On the surface, it’s a story about surfing, about male bonding and its associated competitiveness. But, more significantly, Winton’s book is a story about those bruises – more so how they were inflicted than how they might heal. It’s a story whose power is found in its ambivalence, its exploration of the intangibility of the extraordinary.
That’s heady material – hardly prime for cinematic adaptation. Experienced directors
