ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

This probably sounds like an odd thing to say, but I think that Sandra Hall’s Beyond the Break is more interesting to me now than when it was first published in 2006.  That’s because in 2006 the book’s setting involved the recent past, and many of us would have read it through the lens of our own personal experience of those years.

But reading it now, two decades later…  1959-1964 and 1985 seem like forever ago. There are plenty of adult readers who were not even born in 1985… but more importantly, there have been tectonic changes in the way we perceive relationships.  Today we recognise coercive control and gaslighting in toxic relationships, and we can also recognise that one of the characters has a badly treated mental health problem.

Longlisted for the 2007 Miles Franklin award, Sandra Hall’s Beyond the Break (2006) has been on the TBR so long (15 years!) that it’s out of print.

So here’s the blurb:

Steph, an Australian journalist living in New York, is devastated by the sudden death of Annie, who has been her closest friend since their shared childhood in the Sydney seaside suburb of Coogee 50 years ago.

Returning to Australia at the height of a summer heatwave, Steph tries to account for the reasons behind Annie′s death. At the same time, she renews her relationship with the man once loved by both friends, finding herself confronted by questions of family, friendship, and fundamental rivalries never properly resolved or even acknowledged.

In a wonderfully bittersweet tale of female friendship, lost loves, mothers and daughters, and the secrets that can unfurl within families, Hall explores the past and the surprises it can reveal to haunting effect. Evoking suburban Sydney of the 1950s with astonishing clarity, Hall also recreates the opportunistic mood of 1980s Australia, in which Steph struggles to deal with conflicts she thought she had long since left behind.

Though as the mother of a ‘nipper’ I spent many hours as a volunteer up in the radio room of the Ocean Grove Surf Life Saving Club, I know next to nothing about surfing.  But I know enough to know that ‘beyond the break’ means paddling out behind the breakers, waiting for the opportunity to catch a wave.  It can involve some risk if there are sharks about…

The other things that’s different when reading this book today, is that we are living the legacy of those opportunistic 1980s.

Written in two parts, clearly signalled by the dates Sydney 1959-1964, and Sydney 1985, the novel’s setting focusses on the beachside suburbs where the protagonists can always retreat to the surf when things get tense.

Around the curve of the headland was a cover where the surf was always better than it was anywhere else along the strip.  If we were felling particularly brave, we liked to dive into it from the rocks.  But by the time we arrived, it was mid-morning and so hot that it was impossible to walk barefoot.  To get to the water, you had to do a sort of dance across the sand, doing your best to stay airborne.  There was nobody out in the sun.  The few people around were camped in the shade of a concrete pavilion which had been hollowed out of the cliff beneath the promenade. (p.82)

On one level, Beyond the Break could just be another relationship novel, but the character of Irene takes it to the next level.  Steph was not just BFF to Annie, but was also bewitched by Annie’s mother Irene.  In time Steph comes to be grateful for her own somewhat pedestrian parents, parents who seemed dull and ‘square’ when she was a teenager, but who provided her with stability and security that Annie did not have.  Steph was not mature enough to recognise that Irene’s unflagging enthusiasm for being her daughter’s friend rather than her mother, was emotional abuse.  In the end, Annie flees to America to escape, but the damage has been done.

Wikipedia tells me that Sandra Hall is a journalist and film critic and also the author of another novel, A Thousand Small Wishes (1995). Her non-fiction titles including Tabloid Man: The Life and Times of Ezra Norton (2008); two books on Australian television, Supertoy (1976) and Turning on, Turning Off (1981) and Critical Business: The New Australian Cinema in Review (1985).

Author: Sandra Hall
Title: Beyond the Break
Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2006
Cover design: Katy Wright, Harper Collins Design Studio, cover photograph The Sunbaker#1, 1989 by Anne Zahalka
ISBN: 9780732282424, pbk., 293 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Stonnington Books, $27.95