3/3/2023 0 Comments On her knees tim wintonAt the novel's outset, Pikelet and his aptly named buddy Loonie fall under the sway of Bill Sanderson, a semi-retired international surf god lying low with his collection of vintage boards, bookshelves full of Jack London and Carlos Castaneda, and surly American wife, Eva. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared." Surfing, for him, is ultimately less about gnarly-man competition for bragging rights and girls than about "the outlaw feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing on water was the best and bravest thing a man could do." Not that those more conventional motivations are totally absent. It's is a path of spiritual and aesthetic upward mobility, an escape from the drab mid-1970s Australian mill town where the only men with any style are "a couple of local footballers with a nice leap and a tidy torpedo punt" and "those old coves with plastic teeth and necks like turtles" who got drunk on Anzac Day and "sang sad songs on the verandah of the Riverside before they passed out." The first time he sees local hippies riding the waves, Pikelet, as he's called, thinks: "How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. For Brucie Pike, the adolescent protagonist of Tim Winton's darkly exhilarating ninth novel, surfing doesn't promise endless summers of beach blanket bingo. Even Frankie Avalon, board-shorted stalwart of Hollywood's beach party movies, was given to the odd soggy pronouncement about sun, sand and the meaning of life. The Australian surf legend Nat Young, author of the imposing "Complete History of Surfing" (along with the more usefully prophylactic "Surf Rage"), reportedly once tried to register surfing as a religion. What is it about surfing that inclines so steeply toward the mystical? To the Polynesians who first rode the waves on heavy wooden boards, surfing was a spiritual practice aimed at connecting with the gods of the sea while cementing the power of the nobility, who jealously protected their breaks against incursions by commoners and rivals. $23, Farrar, Straus & Giroux £14.99, Picador.
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