Author serves up a Pine Lime Splice of the surfing life

PEOPLE often speak of surfing and poetry in the same breath.

180611 Surfing

PEOPLE often speak of surfing and poetry in the same breath.

They mean the sport is beautiful to watch, but the analogy is more correct than they know.

Waves are as regular and inexorable as a poetic line, and can vary as widely in form and intensity. Surfers are as much subject to their chosen wave as a poet is to a particular verse form. They may stamp physical rather than metrical feet in making their progress, yet they still inscribe hieroglyphs in the onrushing line, mundane or exquisite according to their skill and imagination.

The point is worth labouring because Malcolm Knox's new novel is not entirely what it seems. Yes, it is an ardent evocation of Australian surf culture, from the 1950s to the present: an encyclopedic act of social and historical recall projected, like an old home-movie, on to the life of a Queensland surfer of singular talent.

But in The Life, Knox has taken a milieu barricaded by private language and codes designed to repel outsiders and wannabes, and in which the insiders' Zen-like reverence for surfaces and the unarticulated act mock writerly eloquence, and made it the backdrop to a universal portrait of artistic obsession.

The fictional anti-hero of The Life is Australia's greatest surfer. He is also a man crushed by genius, in flight from its incessant demands: Rimbaud in a riptide. Not that Dennis Keith, or DK as he is reverently known by the nation's surfers, would have any inkling of the precocious French poet who abandoned the muse while still in his teens to become a gun-runner in 19th-century Ethiopia. He is a human husk, absent of curiosity: a 58-year-old, 115kg obsessive-compulsive body emptied of the one thing -- talent -- that once animated him and gave him purchase on the world.

When we first meet DK he is living with his adoptive mother, Mo, in her Coolangatta retirement unit, his only occupation a daily walk to the corner milk bar to purchase a Pine Lime Splice and a can of Orange Tarax.

It is the unexpected appearance of a young woman who claims to be writing a profile for a surfing magazine that goads DK into a return to origins. She is a stranger yet familiar somehow, a tune he can't quite put a name to. And it is the pluck with which she pursues the truth of his past that, for the first time in years, cracks him open. The determination is hers, but the history we revisit is told through the filter of the old surfer's egotism, his constricted focus.

This can be an infuriating and claustrophobic experience, though never a dull one: the beam cuts because it is narrow. We readers get to partake of his glory, too. And the excitement of a young man growing into full awareness of his gift provides The Life with some of its finest moments:

You paddled out in your first heat of the main conness and ripped. Your back to the wave, you dropped in the pit, leant back and accelerated up the lip. Tossed up big rooster tails of spray. Carved out big sheets on your bottom turns. [Then] you switch-footed. You got up with your left foot at the tail, no leash, and your right foot forward. You carved the left-hander with your face to the wave, like a goofy-footer. You could hear yourself laughing in the middle of you. Nobody knew you could surf both feet, natural or goofy. Nobody ever seen such a thing in a national open.

The fusion of second-person narration with first-person not only generates stylistic energy; it enacts, at the level of grammar, the split between a broken, middle-aged man surveying his youthful self and a surfer whose talent demanded a surrender of consciousness to the act of surfing. The tragedy of DK's life is that it was the "not-I" of his natural ability that burned up the "I" that lives on in failure on dry land.

Of course, that narrative split also delineates the cruel and terrified empty vessel that DK has become and the author who guides his words. Knox has never written better than in The Life. Page after page is radiant with the energy he brings to bear on Dennis's passion for surfing: a passion that readers can only assume Knox shares. It is as though the choice of character -- the masculine, working-class strut of a wildly unconstrained id -- liberated Knox from bourgeois order and temperance. The ripe demotic of DKs surfie tribe and the playfulness and vulgarity that characterise their golden years are rendered with all the kinetic energy of the waves they live to ride.

For all that, The Life is a document of careful, painstaking construction. Knox synchronises DK's story, with its passage from local Coolangatta hero to world-champion to burned-out junkie, and a larger historical narrative. DK's personal failings, of which there are many, are softened by a glimpse of the emerging social and economic order typified by Queensland under Joh Bjelke-Petersen. The white-shoe brigade and their concrete vision of Vegas-on-Sea. The classless, amateur, communal gathering of surfers overwhelmed by the shiny corporatism of the world circuit. The gentler pleasures of the coast's alternative lifestyle giving way to heroin and amphetamines. Village paternalism replaced by corrupt police in their black marias. Throughout Knox intimates that DK's fall from innocence is not an isolated case.

There is pathos, too, in the emptiness of DK's achievement. Looking back he remarks, "Spend 20 years thinking you're surfing but really you're on your feet, for what, add it all up, one hour? Hour and a half? Add it all up and it boils down to nothing." All the wonder he has inspired may be intangible, yet his is not a wasted life in Knox's hands. Dennis Keith can claim, like the poet Keats, to be one of those "whose name is writ in water". Only the ephemeral endures.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.

The Life
By Malcolm Knox
Allen & Unwin, 417pp, $32.99