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HarperCollins UK, 2001 |
She leaned the bike against the railing and, with the baby on her hip, threaded her way along the bank, stepping carefully between clumps of sticky paspalum, on the lookout for the telltale bright green feathery foliage of the asparagus plants but also for snakes, the brown variety: long, fast, deadly. All you saw of them was the dull glitter of scales or a tail section soundlessly exiting, unless you were unlucky enough to step on one, in which case the snake formed as S-shape with its forebody and, jaws fixed in a hideous rictus, struck repeatedly.
The Novel: Rex, a returned soldier, and Irene, a former
member of the Australian Women's Army Corps, meet at the
end of World War Two and marry shortly afterwards. Rex, a farmer descended from a
long line of agricultural workers — none of whom were particularly successful — takes his
twenty year old bride to the 'irrigation farm' he has recently been employed to manage on behalf of his patronising father-in-law. The newlyweds settle down in a comfortable but basic house located
several miles from a town called Progress and do precisely what's expected
of a young married couple in the conformist atmosphere of post-war rural
Australia, quickly producing two children they refer to as 'Girlie' and 'Boy' and
becoming, in time, accepted if uninvolved members of their local community.
But
Irene, a proud and intelligent woman who enjoyed a number of sexual liaisons with visiting GIs and other men during the war, soon finds herself growing disenchanted with her restrictive new life
and, as the years pass, becoming increasingly infuriated by its seemingly rigid limitations.
She tries to lose herself in her hobbies — sewing, preserving fruit,
planting a lavish native garden she takes tremendous pride in — but her
feelings of dissatisfaction persist along with a growing resentment of her timid, overly needy daughter and
dull, unambitious husband. 'Irene could go for days,' we're told, 'without speaking, sleeping with her back to him, doing her chores with
tears in her eyes… Then, in the bedroom, the children asleep, she
unknitted her lips and words poured from her, black as pitch.' Occasionally Rex objects to these strident tongue lashings, beseeching his angry wife to 'Have a heart' only to find his pleas for mercy falling on deaf ears.
One day Rex stumbles upon a letter Irene has written to a former North American
GI sweetheart in which she laments that her beautiful
son, her Boy-O as she calls him, was born of her union with her
uninspiring spouse and not of her infinitely more passionate union with
him. And the situation quickly worsens. At a Saturday night dance in town,
Irene allows herself to be led outside by a flirtatious fertilizer
salesman named Hans. They have sex propped up against his car, with the
adulterous Irene revelling 'in the act, which she found to be deliciously obliterating… Years later
she would remember the feel of the cold metal against her bare
backside.'
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Minerva Publishing first UK edition, 1996 |
The passage of time does nothing to improve Irene's outlook. She continues to despise Rex, criticise Girlie and indulge Boy (encouraging her son to sit and chat with
her while she soaks naked in their claw-footed bathtub as she did when
he was small) as the years go by, finding a degree of solace only in the secretarial position she manages to obtain at the local radio station. Her boss, an ugly
would-be politician, introduces her to the delights of classical music and
modern literature — discoveries that, instead of sweetening her nature,
only make her more conscious of everything she's missed out on in
life. 'Fate,' she feels, 'had been cruel to marry her to a farmer. Such a dull, mean,
ordinary existence! She chewed on the injustice of it like a dog
with a piece of hide.'
Still, her newfound enthusiasm for music leads her to befriend Hildegarde
Hochswender, a motorcyle riding immigrant from Germany who has settled in
Progress with her svelte female companion. It is now 1959 and
Hildegarde becomes a frequent Saturday visitor to Irene's home,
subsequently taking her, Girlie and Boy on a long anticipated camping trip to the
Murrumbidgee River, seventy-five miles from town. Late that night,
after being put to bed by their mother, Girlie and Boy see her and
Hildegarde strip off their clothes and plunge naked into the river
together, their cries of amusement fading to an unsettling silence until
their tryst is abruptly interrupted by a herd of thirsty cows which have blundered into
the campsite.
As Irene ages she grows ever more bitter and critical, a force of nature
her husband and children learn to withstand by deliberately avoiding her. Even being injured in a serious car accident does
nothing to diminish her sense of outrage at the dirty trick she feels that life has played on her. She remains as resentful as ever of her predicament until, one day, her
children do what children inevitably do and grow up. Girlie is the
first to leave the farm, taking with her 'a low-cut, lolly-pink ballgown' and 'a push-up brassière,' and is soon followed by her brother,
footloose and fancy free again after getting his girlfriend pregnant and
taking her to the bustling metropolis of Sydney to undergo an abortion.
The departure of their
offspring sees Irene and Rex lead increasingly separate lives, with Rex
running the farm as he always has while Irene stays out late at night,
returning only as and when she feels like it. With their primary reasons to
remain together now living their own lives far away in the city, Irene enters the kitchen
one hot January morning carrying a suitcase and takes it out
to her car which she then drives away without uttering so much as a single word
to her equally silent if not entirely shocked husband.
Rex calmly watches his wife leave, making no effort to stop her. Yet her
absence causes him to go a little mad, seeing him walk obsessively
around the farm as if determined to expunge every memory of her from his mind. He
neither sleeps nor eats for five days, then falls into a stupor, eventually emerging to discover that his hair has turned white and he too now is now seething with unreleased anger. He impulsively burns all Irene's possessions — the many, that is, that she never
bothered to take with her when she fled the farm — then buys the pigs he's always wanted to raise
and allows them to run wild in her treasured native garden. A month later he
re-sells the animals at a profit and becomes a regular visitor to the town
pub, a place he's seldom visited before and from which he often needs to be
carried home, dead drunk, by his neighbours.
Six months to the day after Irene's wordless departure, Rex gets into his car and drives it into the
Murrumbidgee River, seated stiffly in the driver's seat as the water
covers 'his chest, his shoulders, his chin.' He leaves no
note for his estranged wife or long absent children to find. 'For years,' we're informed, 'he had felt that they were passengers on a train going God knows where,
and he was a solitary figure by the railway line, waving, at first
cordially, but then like a man possessed, until he was waving at
nothing.'
Irene now has what she's always most fervently desired — her freedom. Having
left Progress the same day she abandoned Rex, she takes up with a new man
and moves to the sub-tropical state of Queensland with him. But contentment
still eludes her. As the years pass and her beloved son comes to
visit, she persistently makes a point of asking him where those missing years
went, how she can reclaim them and somehow unmake the many self-defeating mistakes she made throughout her life. Her tone is not sad or nostalgic, but querulous and demanding, as if
she expects to be compensated for the loss of her youth by whatever unseen power was
cruel enough to unite her with a walking disappointment like Rex in the first
place.
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Black Inc Books Australia, 2011 |
My initial reaction to reading Snakes was one of acute envy. Few books possess the emotional power of
this extraordinary debut novel, a power not diminished but rather made all the more resonant by its brevity. (The length of the latest edition
of the book, published in 2011, is 160 widely spaced pages.)
Jennings pulls off the rare feat of telling the story of Irene and Rex and
their disastrous relationship in a series of short, vividly imagined vignettes
without the narrative ever feeling in the least way laboured or disjointed. The reason for this is her astoundingly precise use of
language. The novel could not cover the vast amount of territory it covers — rural
Australia from the mid-1940s until roughly 1980 — and do so with such flawless economy had she not paid scrupulous attention to the way each
and every word is used. Each of its 79 chapters is like a
masterclass in the art of literary concision, with no chapter exceeding
more than 4 pages and many falling well short of that far from elaborate length. Yet by
the end of the book the reader knows its four principal characters as
intimately as they might know the members of their own family, so expert
is Jennings at capturing their narrow rural existence in all its humour, resentment, isolation
and tragedy.
So why did she choose to title the novel Snake? I think the
answer can be found in the quote used to introduce this
post. Snakes are a frequently mentioned threat in the book, as
they are in many parts of rural Australia, but they also serve as an arresting visual metaphor for Irene and her furiously unforgiving nature. Fail to pay
a snake the required amount of attention its presence demands and it will attack and possibly kill you. Fail to pay Irene
the attention and respect she feels entitled to and she may do the same, regardless of
whether you happen to be her confused and feckless husband or her
bewildered, consistently resented daughter. (Her son, of course, escapes this treatment
because, as a handsome and charming young man, he's incapable of doing any wrong in her eyes.)
While she possesses all the qualities typically associated with a
sociopath — selfishness, utter ruthlessness, a heightened and unrealistic
sense of self-importance and the inability to forgive anyone she feels has failed, betrayed or otherwise disappointed her — Irene is also an absurd and, at times, richly amusing figure, too full of
complaints about what life has denied her to be bothered trying to
identify the underlying reasons for her perpetual lack of contentment. But this doesn't make her
someone who can be written off as a fool. The volcanic rage that
underpins her skewed sense of injustice makes her dangerous to
everyone who enters her orbit, a force to be feared rather than a human
being to be accepted, pitied and loved despite her numerous
imperfections.
What Jennings — who based Irene on her own mother and
the novel on her own experiences of growing up in a country town as the daughter of a domineering woman
who consistently sought the attention of men other than her husband and generally disliked other women — wants to show us is the messy life of
a messed-up wife and parent, a person constitutionally incapable of making the emotional compromises necessary to enjoy a semi-satisfying existence. Even the funnier moments of Snake, of
which there are many, can't fully disguise the grim nature of what Irene's
decades of simmering hatred ultimately cost her helpless, love-starved
husband. Nothing is harder to negotiate than relationships and
Snake serves as a powerful reminder of how much of human life is governed by luck of both the positive and negative varieties.
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KATE JENNINGS, c 1985 |
The Writer: 'I wrote my novel Snake,' Kate Jennings
recalled in a 2011 interview to mark its republication by the Black Inc
Press, 'through two long winters at the beginning of the nineties out on Long
Island. No distractions from re-imagining life on an Australian
farm in the fifties… As for the style of the book — the shortness of the
chapters, the precise language — I trained as a poet.'
It was not as a poet but as an editor of poetry that Kate Jennings — born
Catherine Ruth Jennings in Temora, a small town in the Riverina region of
New South Wales, on 20 May 1948 — first made her mark on the Australian
literary scene. She edited a 1975 collection of feminist poetry
titled Mother I'm Rooted which caused great controversy at the time
for its depictions of women struggling against the oppressive power of a
male-dominated society, following it that same year with
Come To Me My Melancholy Baby, her first solo collection of poetry.
Editing what was deemed by the male establishment to be such a strident if not dangerous publication was by no means
Jennings's first brush with controversy. In 1970, while attending
a protest march against the Vietnam War at the University of Sydney, she made a now legendary speech
attacking those who dismissed the concerns of women as being trivial and irrelevant, famously comparing the number of men who had died in the war
with the number of Australian women who had died after receiving illegal
abortions. The speech is often cited as the starting point of the
second wave of feminism in Australia, carrying forward the work of
Germaine Greer and other feminist writers who rose to prominence in the
Women's Liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In 1979 Jennings moved to New York City where she continued to write,
publishing articles and opinion pieces that shone a sometimes unwanted
spotlight on both Australian and North American society, particularly
their financial sectors which she gained first-hand knowledge of while employed as a speechwriter to a male Wall Street executive. This followed her
1987 marriage to graphic artist Bob Cato, a man twenty-five years
her senior, and Cato being diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease
in 1991. 'Life never ever turns out like you think it will,' Jennings observed in a 2008 interview. 'But illness costs a lot in the United States, and I was advised that
for the first time in my life I had to earn proper money.' These experiences would later form the basis of her second novel
Moral Hazard which appeared in 2002 and went on to win her the
Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the NSW Premier's Award and the
2003 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. Like her first novel, Moral Hazard was also listed as a Notable Book of the Year by
The New York Times.
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KATE JENNINGS c 2008 |
Jennings remained in New York following her husband's death in March 1999
and continued to write, publishing a variety of articles and books
including Stanley and Sophie (2008), a memoir about her dogs in
which she describes her life in the city in the wake of 9/11 and reflects
on the role of feminism in the twenty-first century, and the collection
Trouble: Evolution of a Radical–Selected Writings 1973-2010 (2010) containing the best of her work about politics, feminism,
language, finance and literature. Despite having published only two
relatively short novels, she was still deservedly regarded as one of Australia's
greatest writers when she died on 1 May 2021 at the age of seventy-two.
Use the link below to read a 2011 interview with Australian novelist, essayist, activist
and memoirist KATE JENNINGS:
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