But the most important difference is structural: Breath is a flashback. When we meet Bruce Pike, he is middle-aged, divorced, and working as a paramedic. He attends the scene of what appears to be a teenage boy’s suicide and is prompted to recall a troubling episode from his own formative years. The fact that the novel unfolds as one long digression aligns it with Winton’s recent fiction. The dark undercurrents of Dirt Music (2001) and The Turning (2004) have their origins in the characters’ regrets and the various ways in which they have become burdened by the past: they are people living with compromise and disappointment, with the consequences of their own bad decisions, with the narrowing of possibility that comes with age. In one sense, this thematic continuity goes all the way back. Jerra Nilsam, in his early twenties, is already given to raking over his past in order to make sense of his life. Winton’s characters are often encumbered by their own contemplative natures. But the defining feature of Winton’s recent work is the lengthening of this shadow. He has a fascination with the way life can bend someone into a shape their younger self would never recognise. The business of brooding over the past is, as Pikelet puts it, all about ‘explaining yourself to yourself while you’re still sane enough to do it’. The older Winton’s characters get, the more experiences they have to trawl through; the more they become conscious of the ‘lapses of judgement, the surrender to vanity, the weight of loneliness’.

Breath’s hindsight is directed at the teenage impulse toward self-destruction. For Pikelet and Loonie, surfing is their escape. Aided and encouraged by Sando, they begin to look for ever greater challenges, seeking out near-suicidal waves over reefs and shoals of rock far out to sea. The barely understood instinct to place themselves in increasingly dangerous situations is depicted as a pursuit of transcendence, a drive toward that instant of pure experience when the distinction between mind and body collapses and one is totally in the moment. It is the sheer physical thrill of surfing that brings out Sando’s mystical side: ‘It’s about you. You and the sea, you and the planet’; ‘You feel alive, completely awake and in your body. Man, it’s like you’ve felt the hand of God.’ The unreflective Loonie dismisses such talk as ‘hippy-shit’; but the contemplative Pikelet, like the novel itself, has a rather more complex relationship to Sando’s philosophising. Pikelet wonders if their ‘life-threatening high jinks’ are ‘a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath’. He feels life has him by the throat; he is conscious of the way it ‘renders you powerless by dragging you back to it, breath upon breath upon breath’.

The idea that one can feel most alive when courting death is the basis of the novel’s concerns. By encouraging Loonie and Pikelet to pursue danger, Sando encourages them to flee their own selves, their own consciousness, and to reconnect with the pure atavism of instinct and fear. But their hot pursuit of the ineffable is an exercise in trying to outrun something that cannot be outrun. There are inevitably negative consequences. The sinister implications of this longing for quasi-spiritual release in physical sensation comes to be represented tragically in the character of Sando’s embittered American wife, Eva, a former ski jumper whose career has been cut short by injury. Frustrated and deeply unhappy, she seeks release sexually, resorting to techniques of erotic asphixiation. The novel suggests that such striving not only serves to underscore an inevitable decline but is a self-destructive folly.

What distinguishes Winton’s recent work from a number of other writers with metaphysical leanings – Flannery O’Connor, say, or Cormac McCarthy – is that it does not try to evoke a palpable sense of evil. His world contains much that is lamentable and dangerous, but it is not inherently threatening. (No one has to go looking for danger in a McCarthy novel.) Similarly, characters are sometimes damaged and violent, but not irredeemably bad. ‘People are fools,’ observes Pikelet, ‘not monsters.’ This empathy can be double-edged when it is combined with Winton’s visionary instincts. There is a generous humanity, an exultation of the ordinary, informing the celebratory domestic scenes in Cloudstreet (1991), which helped to make that novel one of the best-loved books in Australian literature. But it is also why a self-consciously dark book like The Turning can seem dour and mean rather than tragic. Its air of fatalism appears confected and tendentious, because Winton is a high symbolist working in a realist mode. The same element that elevates his best writing can encumber it: meaning is forced upon his characters whether they like it or not.

Some of this tension is explicit in Breath. The young Pikelet is looking for a higher purpose that the world around him does not appear to provide. More than anything else, he and Loonie fear being ‘ordinary’; but they inhabit a small logging town in which people like to be ordinary. The landscape itself seems to deny transcendence. When Eva tells Pikelet stories of America, and its peculiar ability to embrace religiosity and materialism with equal fervour, it is the land that comes to embody the contrast: ‘There was a certain grandeur in our landscape but it seemed that power and destiny did not adhere to bare plains and dank forests. There were no mighty canyons and mile-wide rivers here. Without soaring peaks and snow, angels seemed unlikely and God barely possible.’

Yet for Winton – and this extends back to his earliest work – the world, and the natural world in particular, is rich in meaning and symbolism. This, combined with his ability to craft a solidly conventional narrative, contributes to Breath’s strong allegorical undertow, some of which is indicated by the literality of the characters’ names. Loonie is a loonie, possessed of a Quixote-like heedlessness. Pikelet, being a contemplative Hamlet, is prone to piking. He is tempted by Eva; and his ex-wife, who appears fleetingly in the novel to grace him with two daughters, is called Grace. The novel is one long push toward Pikelet’s mature realisation that he had ‘misread Sando’s vanity for wisdom’.

Pikelet’s ordinary-guy narration can sometimes strike a note of sentimentality (‘It was a boyhood that now seems so far away I can understand why people doubt such days ever existed’) and reach for moments of clichéd epiphany (‘It changed things between us in ways we could neither foresee nor understand’). But Breath also contains some of Winton’s best writing since Cloudstreet. The book’s many descriptive passages, capturing every ripple and fleck of foam while the boys are out surfing, are flawless examples of the kind of lightly punctuated, rhythmic prose at which Winton excels. It is at these moments, when the novel’s concerns are subsumed by his abilities of a stylist, that his fiction is at its most irresistible and elemental.