The fascinating novel Breath by Michael Symmons Roberts reads less of a story to me than a series of juxtapositions of once-in-a-lifetime experiences: a father loses a son in an accident, an elderly man waits for a lung transplant and a pilot is on her first solo organ transport flight across an unspecified war torn country. Even though the events unfold mostly in chronological order – with intermittent flashbacks – we often don’t quite know where we are, which character’s world we enter with each new chapter, which side of the country we’re in – the North or the South – and yet, it all seems disturbingly familiar. And thus, as we do in our own lives, we pick up the clues and figure things out as we go along.
The breath and its organ, the lungs, appear in many interesting forms, for example when the father looks at his dead son’s body, wondering if “he should place a hand on the lung and press it, pushing out the last breaths.”, while the elderly man is “dragging at the air to recover his breath”. And during the transport flight, the pilot imagines hearing the preserved lung of the boy speaking, “Maybe this is the vestigial voice of the boy, a residue of his voice lodged in his lung.”
It is fitting that Michael Symmons Roberts seamlessly weaves in and out of the different characters’ pasts, presents and futures, mirroring how the events in their lives, though they appear separate, are inextricably linked, perhaps by destiny, by chance and certainly by the breath itself.
I’ll share a couple of excerpts with you here:
Geoff, the father, taking a last look at the body of his dead son in the hospital while the transplant team is waiting:
“He cannot get out of his head the thought that now the blade is going in, now the tight skin of his chest is folded open like a wing, now the cage door of the ribs is prised open to get at the treasures inside. He cannot help imagining the strong young heart, trembling on a steel plate, and the lungs still warm and full of breath. He wonders if the lungs have stored the last breaths of the dead boy, like a print on the retina. Could they hold his last words somewhere, like a voicemail in breath, lost among the alveoli, the countless tributaries of lung?
He stops in the corridor outside his office, suddenly sure that he should go back down, should burst into the theatre before the lung is cut out, and call them all to silence. He should place a hand on the lung and gently press it, pushing out the last breaths. He should lean in and smell the scent of the city, the streets, the ghost of coffee or whisky, and maybe, just maybe, he would catch a whisper of a word or two, a last word from son to father.”
Baras, the elderly man waiting for his lung transplant:
“He lies back in his bed, takes a couple of drags from the oxygen tank and listens to his breath slipping out and back, out and back. Are his lungs pulling and pushing the air, or is the air working him like an old pair of bellows? Out and back, out and back, out and back. Lord Jesus Christ Son of God / have mercy on me a sinner, Lord Jesus Christ Son of God / have mercy on me a sinner, Lord Jesus Christ Son of God / have mercy on me a sinner. After fifty years, the Jesus Prayer is there, under his breath where it was supposed to be. It was put there at school, an implant sewn into the fabric of breath and intended to last him a lifetime.”
Jude, the pilot during her flight to the transplant hospital:
“Jude is flying the small plane by hand and eye above the river heading north, following its bends and straights. She tries to stay focused on the route, on the flight, but her thoughts keep drifting back to the boy whose lung rides in the seat next to her, the boy called Jimmy. She pictures the teenager who woke up this morning full of energy and ideas for his day, the one who now lies in the hospital morgue with his chest peeled open like a fig.
How fragile it is. All of it. How desperate that all those hopes and fears and hours of work and worry from his parents could have come to this, a lung in a picnic box. The more she thinks about him, the more she starts to choke up. She cannot cry. She has a job to do. A job and a duty. But the more she thinks about Jimmy the louder his lung whispers from the box next to her. The lung is gibbering, scared or still in shock. Jimmy’s lung, the keeper of his breath now torn from its moorings, split from its twin, naked, cold, alone.”
Source: Michael Symmons Roberts, Breath, Vintage 2009