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Tim Winton’s new novel Breath promises “sensory momentum”. Kate Eshelby rides the Australian waves

“If you return home and your hair is dry, you live too far from the water,” says Tim Winton, his long hair tied back in a ponytail. “I have to see the water every day.” The 48-year-old novelist has an intense need for wild places and powerful landscapes: untamed, isolated western Australia and the sea have been the inspiration for most of his books, and he’s won several awards for his fervent eco-activism.

Breath, his first novel for seven years, chronicles the strange friendship that develops between two boys, Pikelet and Loonie, and an older man called Sando. All three share a passion for surfing, a sport Winton also loves, having surfed all his life. Together they push themselves to ride increasingly dangerous waves that “[sound] like a battlefield”, inspired by Sando’s fearless determination.

Winton grew up in a working-class suburb of Perth. “There was nothing much to do, so we found things,” he remembers. “When you make your own fun, you also make your own danger. We pushed hard. Half my friends from childhood are now in jail, busted for drugs or dead in car wrecks.” It’s no surprise that so many of the characters in his novels live similarly hard lives in deprived areas. They’re wounded people yearning for escape. They suffer misfortune and regret, but refuse to settle for the quotidian. “Once you’ve had a taste of something different, something kind of out there, then it’s hard to give it up,” says Sando’s American girlfriend, Eva – a former skiing champion whose career was derailed by an accident.

What sets Winton’s writing apart, however, is the way he makes landscape integral to the story rather than a mere backdrop. He writes about his own territory, intimately understanding the nuances of weather and light at different times of day, and the changes in tides and seasons. He conjures the harsh rawness of Australia’s west coast, so that the reader is right there too, smelling the salt of the surf: “Waves ground around the headland, line upon line of them, smooth and turquoise, reeling across the bay to spend themselves in a final mauling rush against the bar at the river mouth.”

Breath is also about middle age – a time when you begin to reflect on how you have become who and what you are. Paramedic Pikelet, who narrates the novel, looks back on his life and gradually comes to understand the profound effect his warped relationship with Eva has had on his character. We discover, in time, that he has good cause to think so deeply about the seemingly simple act of breathing. “There are pivotal, formative moments in life that alter how people are forever. I am who I am because of the teenager I was,” says Winton. Sando is afraid of growing old, and his friendships with Loonie and Pikelet exist purely to make him feel young again. As Winton writes: “Nearly everyone is terrified that this, whatever life has become, is it.”

Winton was just 20 when he published his first novel, An Open Swimmer. Since then he’s been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize – for The Riders in 1995 and for Dirt Music in 2002. “When I’m writing, the thrill is imaginatively being there. I am a storyteller. I want to give people an experience, taking the reader from their world and to achieve sensory momentum,” he says. His meticulous attention to detail brings simple incidents alive, such as the moment just before Eva has sex with Pikelet: “She was a foot away. She smelled of butter and cucumber and coffee and antiseptic.”

Winton says that when he first began writing, ordinary, uneducated people were deemed unworthy of inclusion in novels. “Writers only wrote about articulate, educated people. But these were not the people I knew about.” This is why Winton likes to focus on “white trash”: “I love vernacular writing like Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Hardy; the language is different, musical and strange. And I enjoy reading working-class writers like Stan Barstow and John Braine, who give a sense of a different England to the one represented by all the Oxbridge voices.”

Eventually, at the end of Breath, Pikelet is able to atone for the damage of his past, but his youthful need to feel charged never ends. “Some people like the surge of adrenalin,” shrugs Winton. “They become addicted to this reaction and normal life seems boring in comparison to the thrill of pushingthe boundary experiences. I remember the feeling of surfing as a six-year-old boy; the buzz, like learning to ride a bike, you never forget.”

Breath is out now.