Australians Abroad - An Outback Marriage

Set in rural Australia in the post war years, Snake echos the theme of Madame Bovary and Lessing's The Grass is Singing. A disatisfied woman founders in a boring marriage with a man who wants nothing more out of life but to "harvest his crops, care for his animals, [and] to share it all with a good woman". The novel tells the tale of the sad and wasted lives of these two mismatched people, Rex and Irene. The couple and their children (known only as Boy and Girlie) live out unfulfilled lives of loneliness and drabness, somewhere in the outback. In the unquestioning way of fifties Australia, they do not introspect, and the few insights into life come from the thoughts of minor characters who appear fleetingly - the guest at the wedding, the man from the town radio station.

Snake is a very short novel and the sort of book to be savoured, for although it can easily be read in one sitting, there's a need to put it down and to contemplate the beauty and insight of Kate Jennings' prose. With the starkness and brevity of a Drysdale portrait, Kate Jennings paints with words, a portrait of a marriage doomed to failure.

Kate Juliff
New York
1999