Breath Study Guide

Tim Winton was born in 1960 in the suburbs of Perth, the capital city of Western Australia. He lived in these suburbs until age 12, when he moved to the provincial hub of Albany. While still an undergraduate at the Western Australia Institute of Technology, Winton launched his writing career with the novel An Open Swimmer, which won the 21-year-old the prestigious Australian/Vogel Literary Award for works by young writers. This promising start has led to a career of over 40 years that has produced a dozen novels, along with several collections of short stories, plays, children’s books, and nonfiction. Though Winton has spent time living in Greece, France, Ireland, and Italy, his works almost always focus on the Western Australian countryside where he grew up and where he currently resides. Winton has built a reputation on capturing the unique flavor of this rugged terrain and the people who inhabit it. The dramatic natural environment of this region figures prominently in his work, and he has devoted considerable energy outside of his fiction-writing career to environmental advocacy connected with the area. Winton’s reputation is international, but in Australia he is considered a national treasure and one of the foremost novelists of his generation. He has a wife, Denise, and children, but he is known to keep his family out of the public eye.

Breath was written in the mid-2000s, a time of rapid change around the globe. Bruce is the same age as the author, and he becomes a vehicle for Winton’s reflections on the transformations that society has undergone between his adolescence in the 1970s and the mid-2000s. The first and last chapters of the novel depict a post-9/11 Internet age (the Twin Towers falling is the computer screensaver of a boy who dies in the first chapter). In the novel, this time period is defined by economic upheavals and the dismantling of the working class: the epilogue details how Bruce’s town lost its sawmill and gradually became a bed-and-breakfast destination for affluent urbanites. The novel recognizes the tendency to view the 1970s as a lost golden age of freedom and adventure, but it makes a point of undercutting that narrative by showing the dark side of that era and the radically unsupervised lives of teenagers at the time. On a more specific level, the novel reflects Winton’s own lifelong love of surfing: he has said in interviews that the angst and ecstasy Bruce experiences in surfing are drawn from his own teenage experiences, and that he still enjoys surfing today.

Many of Winton’s novels take place in the same area of Western Australia where Breath is set, and Winton has undertaken worldbuilding through the use of recurring characters that establish a common literary universe in which his books take place. Bruce’s girlfriend Queenie Cookson in Breath, for instance, had already appeared as early as Winton’s second novel, Shallows (1984), and she appears again in his short-story collection Minimum of Two (1988) and in several of the books in his young-adult Lockie Leonard series. Beyond just the geographical setting, many of Winton’s books cover similar themes to Breath, beginning from his first novel An Open Swimmer (1981), which is likewise a Bildungsroman that involves grappling with the power of nature and adolescent characters uncovering dark secrets about their older mentors. Both Winton’s recurring explorations of masculinity and his tough, simplistic prose style can be traced to Ernest Hemingway. The aforementioned Shallows, however, takes an older American writer as its model: Herman Melville, whose classic Moby Dick influenced Winton’s novel’s exploration of the Australian whaling industry. While Breath takes on the fundamental struggle of man and nature epitomized in Melville and Hemingway, it also investigates darker regions of psychosexual perversion more associated with writers like J. G. Ballard, whose 1973 novel Crash depicts a subculture of people erotically stimulated by car crashes. Winton’s transposition of these themes to an Australian setting naturally put him in conversation with his national contemporaries like Peter Carey and Kate Grenville, whose works similarly explore the nuances of Australian identity.