Barbarian Days - William Finnegan (Penguin 2005)
- Edward Nightingale
- Feb 3, 2017
- 2 min read
Big waves are not measured in feet, but in increments of bullshit.
This feels like a few books in one: autobiography, surfing almanac, political tract and travelogue. And it seems aimed at a wide readership. There’s enough in it to keep the non-surfer (me) in touch – ‘the wave trains produced by a storm constitute what surfers call a swell’ and the like – but there’s also plenty that must work only for the initiated. Overall I think it succeeds, just. Then again, it won a Pulitzer Prize in 2016 and Obama has just put it at the top of his summer reading list. And Finnegan is a respected and decorated journalist with plenty of other books to his name, so I may be misjudging its quality.
Its descriptions of the ocean, and waves in particular, are excellent. Waves are his ‘deepest desire’ and his ‘mortal enemy’, and from in a barrel he can see the ‘spilling lip’ of one ‘twisting like the iris of a camera lens opening’, or another ‘mutate into a hideous, boiling, two-storey wall of whitewater’. In each set of them is ‘beautiful hopelessness [and] even more beautiful hope.’ And I really like his adjectives for waves – although they mean less to the non-surfer, they’re sufficiently suggestive to sharpen the imaginary ride. I don’t know what shifty, crumbly, meaty and mushy really mean when they describe a body of water, but I like guessing. The other enjoyable language for a ‘kook’ – and perhaps an expert too – are the names of the places where waves are found. Some of these ring a bell of recognition from Beach Boys lyrics – Waimea, Rincon, Redondo – and others just have a great ring to them: Tonggs, the Rice Bowl, Cliffs, the Butter Box, and so on. They sound worth visiting.
Finnegan is a surfer with pedigree, and also interesting on surfing’s history and etiquette. His Hawaiian childhood attunes him to the culture of surfing’s ancestral home, where European missionaries first tried to stamp out the practice as ungodly. And his sensitivity to human interaction means he’s good on the ‘surfing social contract’, including claiming, line ups and wave size. He records his experience of different attitudes to surfing around the world, from its subversive, countercultural reputation in 1970s California, through Honduras, Tahiti, Indonesia, Western Samoa and Fiji, to its organized and mainstream sporting status in Australia. And during what seems like his own Endless Summer (or Winter, as he would have it), he offers his readers a compelling honesty about just everything: fear, naivety, aging, family, friendship, selfishness – the lot. It emerges that his motivation to surf comes as much from the push of the shore as from the pull of the ocean. As he confesses, wave chasing is ‘an excellent excuse to postpone mundane but frightening decisions about…how to live.’ I reckon that’s not something many surfers would admit.
So, though it’s not my favourite surfing book, the more I think about it the more I like it. And I’m glad I got to it before Obama did, especially given how busy I am.
Comments