What an astonishing and beautiful book this is. Surfing as a metaphor for life. Surfing as life! It's so well written it simply stops you in your tracks sometimes. :: Surfing appears to get you nowhere. You paddle out, you sprint for a wave, you ride it shorewards … and repeat. The sessions last hours; the rides, seconds. At the end of your time in the water, you’re in the same position that you were when you began – only more exhausted and with seawater in your nostrils. It is an exercise in running to stand still.

Near the end of Barbarian Days, William Finnegan’s luscious memoir about his life-long infatuation with surfing, the author describes a wave of huge power in which this tension becomes manifest. In “dead-clear water” off the coast of Madeira, he can see the rocks on the bottom of the sea, and begins to notice something weird about the wave he’s riding.

“Sometimes the bottom did not move at all,” he writes. “The big white boulders underneath the water were stationary, or even inching slightly backward. There was, that is, so much water rushing up the face that no matter how fast your board was moving across the surface, you were, in land terms, standing still … Then, after a few moments of this stomach-turning suspended animation, you would suddenly start rocketing down the coast, with the boulders turning into a long white blur under blue water.”

For all the beauty of such moments – and the author’s ability to recall and describe them – they are haunted by real danger. Several times in this memoir, Finnegan recounts how he is nearly drowned or dashed against the rocks. There may be readers who find his continual risk-taking loathsome and selfish – particularly during the final sections of the book, when he becomes a father to a little girl. I could never be so hard on him.

Finnegan has surfed since before his voice broke. The pursuit of waves, he explains, has given him the means to discover his limits and his place in the world. Surfing is not a sport for him, but a “path”.

Early in the book, Finnegan examines how the pull of waves is intimately connected to their lethal nature: “Surfing always had this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things … Everything out there was disturbingly interlaced with everything else. Waves were the playing field. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy … The ocean was like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure.”

Barbarian Days is a more or less chronological account of Finnegan’s relationship with the Ocean God. The story is also a road trip: a memoir that spans his first encounter with waves off the California coast, his adolescence in Hawaii, a seemingly endless round-the-world wave-hunt in his 20s, transformative surf trips in Fiji and Madeira as an adult, and finally the cold winter breaks near his Manhattan home, where he still surfs in his 60s. It is also, slyly, a memoir about Finnegan’s writing life, from his early years as the author of rambling and unpublished novels to his distinguished career reporting on conflict, politics and much else for the New Yorker.

Finnegan’s recollection of his life as a child and teenager is striking for the repeated incidents of violence that punctuate it. In Hawaii, where his parents moved for work (his father was a television producer), playground fights were taken seriously. Finnegan’s unofficial orientation programme at his high school “included a series of fistfights, some of them formally scheduled”. It is shocking and liberating to learn of the independence he was afforded. How many parents now would allow their 14-year-old sons to head out in the deep swell off Hawaii every day before school, without supervision?

All these ass-kickings and near-drownings don’t seem to hurt Finnegan in the long run. In his 20s he drops out of college, takes acid, surfs, drops back in, works the railroad as a brakeman, then freewheels through Australasia in search of great waves. Reading these pages engenders deep nostalgia for travel in the pre-internet and pre-mobile phone days. Finnegan and his fellow-surfing (and fellow-writing) friend, Bryan di Salvatore, fall off the map for months at a time, occasionally receiving mail post restante, making money where they can, and staying with local families.

Their existence is every kind of untethered. For instance, they decide to travel to Tonga, rather than Tahiti, because of a “chance encounter in a waterfront bar with the Australian purser on a freighter bound for Nuku’alofa, the Tongan capital. We boarded the ship, not sober, at midnight. It left Apia at dawn.”

Finnegan’s descriptions of riding waves are filled both with the magical argot of his craft and the clean-hewn simile with which his writing on other subjects is distinguished. The view from inside a wave’s barrel, for instance, is like “the iris of a camera lens opening”. Finnegan is particularly good on the aftermath of a great session in the water: “It was physical, this postsurf mood, but it had a distinct emotionality too. Sometimes it was mild elation. Often it was a pleasant melancholy. After particularly intense tubes or wipeouts, I felt a charged and wild inclination to weep, which could last for hours.”

Eventually, Finnegan wonders what the hell he’s doing with his life. After a spell in Australia, he writes: “I felt unmoored from all possible explanations for this trip. It was certainly no longer a vacation. What was I vacationing from?”

Surfing is a way of explaining his presence in certain places in the world, but it begins to feel more like a hobby than a calling, especially as Finnegan becomes more interested in the geopolitical tumult he sees around him. When he finds a job teaching black children in apartheid South Africa, it is the start of another journey: to find the stories in the world with the most power and pull. Seeing “institutionalised injustice and state terror” made him less inclined to surf. He became “impatient with, among other things, myself”.

But surfing, a first love, can never be abandoned. Even now, as a sexagenarian who curses as he clambers to his feet in the frigid north Atlantic swell near his home, Finnegan will not leave the waves alone. It would have been interesting to understand more about how this obsession had intersected with his marriage. His wife, Caroline, is a criminal lawyer with her own successful career. The couple have a daughter, Mollie. But in addition to foreign reporting trips, Finnegan recounts long winter surf breaks with his friends when his family is left at home. This, I know from experience, is not an uncomplicated proposition in a marriage. And yet his wife’s reaction seems to be one of the utmost understanding. Finnegan once asks Caroline why she didn’t get angry “about all the stupid risky things I did”. Her helpful reply, as reported by the author, is: “She assumed I needed to do them.”

Need is a strong word. Nobody needs to surf. But then, if we’re talking about mere survival, nobody needs to play the piano or climb a mountain or read books. Finnegan explains that his relationship with surfing has been about seeking a “broad-beamed understanding of what is what”; in the water he experiences “brief, sharp glimpses of eternity”.