MEMOIR
BARBARIAN DAYS - A SURFING LIFE
By William Finnegan
Murdoch Books, $29.99
William Finnegan's rip-roaring memoir of a life spent chasing the world's waves is nothing short of superb. I can't think of a book more captivating, entertaining and sublimely written that I've read in a long time. And this is the verdict of an avowed landlubber who has never clambered aboard surfboard and, now in my early 40s, probably never well. For surfing aficionados, this will be the ultimate literary rush.
Finnegan – a staff writer at the New Yorker – started surfing as a young boy on the beaches of California and Hawaii in the mid 1960s. His teenage obsession has barely dimmed in the years since. A surfboard has been his constant companion through vagabond years hunting down secluded surf spots in the atolls and islands of the Pacific and Asia and later as navigates the shoals of middle age and fatherhood. Through a series of well-turned character sketches we meet many of the fellow quirky obsessives Finnegan – almost all of them men – has surfed with along the way. Romances fall second best to the waves until he meets a woman, ironically, with no interest in surfing.
The book cracks along at a pounding pace and brims with easy, vivid, involving prose. Wry, richly observational accounts of the places he's travelled such as South Africa, Sumatra in Indonesia and Madeira, an Atlantic outpost of Portugal besieged by gnarly waves, felt so alluring that they made me want to buy one-way tickets. He's surfed his way through a fair whack of Australia too, where the waves vary from "sweet, warm, soft, a little sloppy" to having "a crazy hammering power".
In the early parts of the book, Finnegan is writing about my lifetime but felt like a bygone era, almost a personal history of a pre-Internet era long passed. When Finnegan hopscotched around the Pacific and Australia in the late 1970s, the degree to which he could be off the map for months at an end seems incredible in this now uber-connected world.
The book is styled and packaged as a memoir of surfing. The cover picture is of a shirtless Finnegan board in hand looking, perhaps, for the next big refrigerator of a wave – yes that is apparently a descriptor for what surfers call waves. But in many ways this is a book about much more. At various points it becomes a touching reflection of the contours and peculiarities of male friendship, and the challenges of forging our own path in life. Scenes late in the book with Finnegan's parents – now since passed, and who displayed remarkable unconcern at young Finnegan's gallivants back in the day – are poignant and incredibly moving. In a subtle and un-showy way, Barbarian Days is also about a book about the craft and profession of writing. When he wasn't scouting for the next wave, Finnegan was wrestling self-doubt about whether he had the chops to make it a writer. All writers are wracked by insecurity. It seems to come with the territory. With this big Kahuna of a book, I'm hope Finnegan has put a lot of his to rest.
Highly recommended.
Gordon Peake's Beloved Land: Stories Struggles and Secrets from Timor-Leste won the 2014 ACT Book of the Year and People's Choice Awards
