Breath Summary

Breath takes place primarily on the rugged coast of Western Australia. In the present day, middle-aged Bruce, the novel’s narrator, is a paramedic. He and his inexperienced younger partner, Jodie, race to respond to an emergency call in the suburbs. They arrive to find a family in distress and immediately sense that they are too late: a boy has hung himself. Upstairs, the mother, June, has already cut down her son from the noose where he was found and laid out his body. Bruce gently tries to get information out of June about her son’s habits, but she is angry and incommunicative. After they leave, Jodie is emotional about her first on-duty suicide response, but Bruce declares that the boy’s death was actually an accident. The next day, he wakes up alone in his apartment and blows the didjeridu on his balcony before launching into the story of his adolescence, ostensibly to explain how he knows that the boy did not commit suicide.

Bruce looks back to the 1970s, when he was a tween growing up in a rural sawmill town. An only child of reserved older parents, he lives a solitary life until meeting Loonie, a boy his age fond of daredevil stunts. The two become fast friends and “rivals” and spend their summer days daring each other to do dangerous tricks, modding their bikes, and competing to hold their breaths the longest underwater. Bruce has long fantasized about going down to the ocean, but his father prohibits it. One day, he ignores the rules and rides down there with Loonie, where they watch older boys surf for the first time. The boys are enraptured and start returning again and again, gradually learning to surf. Bruce’s father takes his son’s betrayal personally, and a distance begins to grow between them. However, Loonie’s cruel father, Karl, hires the boys to chop wood outside his pub, allowing them to save up and buy their own surfboards. That effort earns some degree of respect, if not understanding, from Bruce’s father.

Down at the shore, Bruce and Loonie have long been fascinated by the enigmatic older figure Sando, a master surfer who is always by himself. One day, Sando gives them a lift back and tells them they can store their boards under his house, right near the beach. When they return later on to retrieve their boards, Sando is gone and his wife, Eva, is cold to them and skeptical of their claims. In the water, an older boy named Slipper pressures Bruce and Loonie into surfing a wave beyond their experience, and their half-successful but bold attempt thrills them and earns the older guys’ respect. When they return their boards to the house, Eva’s mood has lightened, and she gives the boys a ride back to town. Eventually, Sando returns, and he begins taking the boys under his wing, allowing them to soak up his life philosophy and deep knowledge of surfing. They relish this new relationship.

One day, Bruce and Loonie arrive at Sando’s house to pick up their boards and find that a box of old surfing magazines have been left on top of them. They flip through them and discover that Sando was once a world-famous surfing celebrity. Sando returns and finds them looking at the magazines, which upsets him and causes a shouting match with Eva in which he accuses her of exposing his past. He forgives the boys, however, and soon he takes them to a remote but excellent surf break called Barney’s—named for Barney the great white shark who lives in the waters. The boys succumb to his pressure and surf in the shark-infested waters, feeling their confidence swell. Sando tries to describe to the boys the feeling of a near-death surfing experience, filling their heads with ideas about becoming “extraordinary.”

When the school year begins, Bruce discovers that he likes reading and finds a girlfriend, Queenie Cookson, in the library. Meanwhile, Loonie breaks his arm in a dumb antic and has to miss out on Sando taking Bruce to surf Old Smoky, a giant and dangerous offshore wave. At the site, Bruce is terrified and nearly bails, but Sando convinces him to go for it. Bruce gets seriously knocked about but manages to get two successful rides and is ecstatic. Loonie is incensed about missing the outing, and once his arm heals, he surfs the same wave with greater recklessness and daring than either of them.

From this point on, the three become a more serious surfing regiment, and Sando instructs them in diet and exercise. On the way to school one day, Bruce’s bus comes across a horrific crash between a car and a cattle truck, and he leaps into the fray to try and rescue the surviving passengers before the cops arrive. At a school dance that night, Queenie scolds him for not telling her about this traumatic experience. She soon breaks up with him. Meanwhile, Loonie has been spying on the sex worker, Margaret Myers, living above his father’s pub. He makes Bruce come to watch one day, and her client at the time turns out to be Loonie’s father.

One day, Sando tells the boys about a never-surfed wave he’s discovered in the ocean, called the Nautilus. They scope it out and begin preparing for an attempt, but Bruce is worried that it’s too dangerous. Loonie, however, scorns any admission of fear. While they wait for an appropriate storm to make the attempt, Bruce languishes in his daily life, finding all normal activities unsatisfying compared to life-risking surfing. Bruce romantically reconnects with Queenie on a school trip, but he contracts pneumonia and briefly lands in the hospital.

The months wear on, and Loonie quits school and gets a job in the sawmill, leaving Bruce and Sando alone together for long periods for the first time. Their bond deepens and develops a new intellectual dimension. During this time, Sando reveals that the American Eva was once a professional ski jumper before a career-ending knee injury, hence her bitterness. Soon, Loonie gets fired, and he and Sando depart without warning to Indonesia on a surfing trip. Bruce is baffled and hurt. He feeds Sando’s dog while they are away, thereby getting to know Eva better, who stews bitterly at home. When Loonie and Sando return, Bruce feels boxed out of their friendship.

Nevertheless, the three of them resume surfing and soon make an attempt on the Nautilus, with Sando providing them all with classic Brewer surfboards. At the Nautilus, Loonie and Sando surf but Bruce opts out. He later feels that this drives a wedge further between him and them. In the next big storm, the other two return to the Nautilus without even telling him, and in resentment he gets the third Brewer from Sando’s house and surfs Old Smoky alone, succeeding at first but then getting tossed and nearly drowning, losing the board. Later, Sando gives kudos to Bruce for his bravery and gives him the surfboard, which had been recovered by a fisherman.

Sando and Loonie then depart for a trip to Java. While they are gone, Eva seduces Bruce, taking his virginity and initiating an extended affair, which completely takes over the young Bruce’s life. During this period, Eva reveals more about her background with Sando and her injury, which has led her to use drugs heavily and seek a trace of the fearful thrill skiing used to provide her in a new pastime: autoerotic asphyxiation. She manipulates Bruce into choking her every time they have sex, scarring and frightening Bruce. One day, she reveals that she is pregnant (with Sando’s baby), ending their affair. Sando returns, revealing that he and Loonie had a falling out and that Loonie has continued traveling. Bruce avoids them from here onward but remains tormented over his former relationship with Eva, and his home and school life suffer. He sees Sando in the water one day and the two discuss ordinariness and extraordinariness. On shore, he sees Eva for the first time in months and blackmails her into one final sexual rendezvous, despite her being several months pregnant.

Bruce then summarizes the several decades between this point and the present day. Shortly after his last meetup with Eva, his father is killed in an accident at the sawmill. Bruce largely gives up surfing and goes to college. He makes an effort to repair his relationship with his mother, but a gulf remains between them. He marries a woman named Grace Andrews, but his sexual attraction to her pregnant body and subsequent other remarks creep her out. They have two daughters together, but she eventually leaves him.

After this, Bruce spends years wandering in addiction and aimlessness. He hears that Loonie dies in a drug deal in Mexico. He reads in the newspaper that Sando has started a successful sportwear company, but later he reads that Eva is found dead hanging in a hotel room. Bruce eventually stabilizes and finds his paramedic job as an acceptable way to provide him with the adrenaline rush he craves. He still returns to his childhood home from time to time and casually surfs, focused now on the gentle beauty that initially drew him to the sport rather than the crazed, life-risking endeavor that it quickly became.